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Venba
2023
Most of the conversation I’ve seen around Venba has revolved around the story of the entire family the game is about, but centered on the point of view of Kavin, the child. A second generation immigrant, Kavin experiences the social pressures of otherness growing up and we see this expressed through his own insecurities with his situation and his attempts to fit in throughout his life as well as via the way his mother Venba vents her frustrations with how she feels he’s rejecting his culture and his family, with his dad Paavalankind of caught in an empathetic middle ground. I get why this happens – I think a lot of the people who like, actually play the game are more likely to identify with Kavin, and the game shifts more focally to his perspective in the back half, and he’s admittedly something of a reflection of the lived experiences of the game’s lead designer, whose life the game is heavily drawn upon. And I don’t want to downplay Kavin’s experience; obviously modern second gen kids’ relationships with their parents are stories that a lot of people connect strongly to – it’s a really common thing in my generation. But when I was playing the game I couldn’t help but find myself so much more drawn to Venba herself.
My wife is from India, and while it seems kind of funny in hindsight there was in fact a lot of hubbub when we first got together. We were dating in secret for a long time because there was sure to be controversy over my whiteness and my religion. When we got found out it was a little longer before I was allowed to meet her parents and then a lot longer before I felt like, actually accepted, which is fair. Things were very different from how they were expecting things to go, even if my wife herself never really planned to adhere to these expectations. I always thought her mom HATED me though, even after the CONTROVERSY of our relationship cooled off. She was so quiet around me, so distant, and I never knew how to talk to her. But it turned out she also felt that way about me. Insecure and weird about this stranger that she felt like she had zero common ground with.
Eventually we bonded over two things: our mutual love of roasting the shit out of my wife and my sincere appreciation for her cooking. She’s got this deep well of recipes and they’re all so fuckin good dude but neither of her kids have any real interest in cooking like at all, even before my wife became too disabled for that to be something she could realistically do, so I think she took some genuine pleasure from it when I started asking persistently for her to teach me how to make some of her stuff when we would visit each other, and now I have a pretty good stock of family recipes that’s still steadily growing, with my wife and mother-in-law’s seal of approval. (In fact I would say that if you have a working knowledge of how to cook most basic Indian foods then most of the puzzle elements of Venba will be essentially negated because it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Tamil Nadu or West Bengal, a masala is a masala and a biryani is a biryani and a dosa is a dosa). But I’ve also spent a lot of time with her now over the years, doing this stuff, and a pretty good amount of time with her alone, and you start to know people, and I see so much of her in Venba.
A woman who moves about as far away from her life, her home, her family as it is possible to move, unwillingly, as a matter of practicality, Venba never quite assimilates. A qualified, highly educated worker in her home country arbitrarily unable to find work in her new one for racist reasons, relying on a stressed partner to make ends meet while she handles domestic duties and isolates herself, partially because her new society rejects her and partially because she rejects it. “I have Paavalan,” she says at one point. “I have Kavin.” There are all kinds of reasons why and they might even create a twisted ouroboros sometimes but ultimately Venba just doesn’t like it in Canada, and she did like it in India, and if she had her way she would probably just like, go home. It hurts her to be apart from her parents when they get old and get sick. It hurts her to see her son so easily slip into this culture she feels embittered towards and treat her like part of the embarrassing thing to leave behind.
I think my mother in law feels that way a lot of the time, especially since both of her children have left the nest, although this is where her experience diverges from Venba’s. My wife and her brother are very close to their mom, and I think that’s part of what anchors her here, despite everything. They don’t have the contentious relationship that Venba and Kavin have that gives Venba kind of a freedom to return to where she’s happy, or to necessitate the reunion and reconciliation that they loosely share in the final chapter. ac
While my secondhand experience with a life that Venba so strongly evokes in my mind’s eye does make me feel a little frustrated at how cleanly this game resolves its lingering conflicts by the end of it all, I don’t think it falls into the trap of, as a friend of mine wisely phrased it yesterday, “barren sentimentality” that I think even well-meaning games often fall into when they try to tackle real subject matter. Venba may be a short game whose focus on food and small scope limits the windows into these lives that we’re allowed to peer into, but its dialogue is often cutting, it knows when not to pull punches, and it says a lot without words.
The writing is uniformly excellent but I think the best stuff is consistently the way the game communicates without words. The way Kavin’s letters unfold more slowly across his word balloons when he speaks Tamil vs when his parents do or when he’s speaking English for most of the game because he’s less comfortable with the language; the way that the last time you play as Venba there’s minimal interactivity because at this point in her life she’s memorized her recipes and developed her own techniques and using newer equipment for the most part, so there are no puzzles to solve and all the game asks from the player is a couple of button presses or stick rotations; the way that when you’re playing as Kavin he just kind of drops or tosses ingredient containers gracelessly back onto the counter vs the way Venba would put them back down like a normal person. There’s a moment where you’re texting and the game is auto-advancing the conversation but once you’re given the freedom to exit the conversation you can actually scroll up and see the entire thing again, including the beginning chunk of it that you weren’t originally shown and it is as horrible as you would imagine. Venba is such a short game and its vignettes are necessarily so focused that this intimate attention to detail makes a huge difference in the texture of the world.
Applicability is very real, I suppose. On its face Venba is an incredibly generic immigrant story, with only the food angle making it stand out narratively, but even then it isn’t even the only “wholesome indie game about a second generation immigrant trying to reconnect somehow to a parent via family recipes” that I know of off the top of my head. We all know people who have lived the broad details of this family’s story. But the particular voices that come out of their mouths are bold and articulate and human. Enough for it to evoke specific traumas in my wife, who loved this game, enough to make me wistful about my relationship with her mother, which is occasionally complicated. And I know other people who have felt similarly. It’s easy for me to imagine a lesser version of this game and I’m glad I don’t have to talk about that one haha.
As I write this we’re four days into a six day visit from my wife’s dad, whom I often struggle to get along with, and who doesn’t know that I’m transgender, and her brother, who is cool but who left early this afternoon. Today has been the first time we’ve had a break from work or being around them constantly since they arrived. It’s been a long and stressful week, but getting a couple hours to play through this game was in turns relaxing and sad and fun and cathartic. And we’re about to go out to eat at a South Indian restaurant with her dad, which was a happy coincidence that we’ve had planned for a couple of weeks. I think we’re gonna go ham on some dosas. Maybe try not to cry about Venba while we do.
My wife is from India, and while it seems kind of funny in hindsight there was in fact a lot of hubbub when we first got together. We were dating in secret for a long time because there was sure to be controversy over my whiteness and my religion. When we got found out it was a little longer before I was allowed to meet her parents and then a lot longer before I felt like, actually accepted, which is fair. Things were very different from how they were expecting things to go, even if my wife herself never really planned to adhere to these expectations. I always thought her mom HATED me though, even after the CONTROVERSY of our relationship cooled off. She was so quiet around me, so distant, and I never knew how to talk to her. But it turned out she also felt that way about me. Insecure and weird about this stranger that she felt like she had zero common ground with.
Eventually we bonded over two things: our mutual love of roasting the shit out of my wife and my sincere appreciation for her cooking. She’s got this deep well of recipes and they’re all so fuckin good dude but neither of her kids have any real interest in cooking like at all, even before my wife became too disabled for that to be something she could realistically do, so I think she took some genuine pleasure from it when I started asking persistently for her to teach me how to make some of her stuff when we would visit each other, and now I have a pretty good stock of family recipes that’s still steadily growing, with my wife and mother-in-law’s seal of approval. (In fact I would say that if you have a working knowledge of how to cook most basic Indian foods then most of the puzzle elements of Venba will be essentially negated because it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Tamil Nadu or West Bengal, a masala is a masala and a biryani is a biryani and a dosa is a dosa). But I’ve also spent a lot of time with her now over the years, doing this stuff, and a pretty good amount of time with her alone, and you start to know people, and I see so much of her in Venba.
A woman who moves about as far away from her life, her home, her family as it is possible to move, unwillingly, as a matter of practicality, Venba never quite assimilates. A qualified, highly educated worker in her home country arbitrarily unable to find work in her new one for racist reasons, relying on a stressed partner to make ends meet while she handles domestic duties and isolates herself, partially because her new society rejects her and partially because she rejects it. “I have Paavalan,” she says at one point. “I have Kavin.” There are all kinds of reasons why and they might even create a twisted ouroboros sometimes but ultimately Venba just doesn’t like it in Canada, and she did like it in India, and if she had her way she would probably just like, go home. It hurts her to be apart from her parents when they get old and get sick. It hurts her to see her son so easily slip into this culture she feels embittered towards and treat her like part of the embarrassing thing to leave behind.
I think my mother in law feels that way a lot of the time, especially since both of her children have left the nest, although this is where her experience diverges from Venba’s. My wife and her brother are very close to their mom, and I think that’s part of what anchors her here, despite everything. They don’t have the contentious relationship that Venba and Kavin have that gives Venba kind of a freedom to return to where she’s happy, or to necessitate the reunion and reconciliation that they loosely share in the final chapter. ac
While my secondhand experience with a life that Venba so strongly evokes in my mind’s eye does make me feel a little frustrated at how cleanly this game resolves its lingering conflicts by the end of it all, I don’t think it falls into the trap of, as a friend of mine wisely phrased it yesterday, “barren sentimentality” that I think even well-meaning games often fall into when they try to tackle real subject matter. Venba may be a short game whose focus on food and small scope limits the windows into these lives that we’re allowed to peer into, but its dialogue is often cutting, it knows when not to pull punches, and it says a lot without words.
The writing is uniformly excellent but I think the best stuff is consistently the way the game communicates without words. The way Kavin’s letters unfold more slowly across his word balloons when he speaks Tamil vs when his parents do or when he’s speaking English for most of the game because he’s less comfortable with the language; the way that the last time you play as Venba there’s minimal interactivity because at this point in her life she’s memorized her recipes and developed her own techniques and using newer equipment for the most part, so there are no puzzles to solve and all the game asks from the player is a couple of button presses or stick rotations; the way that when you’re playing as Kavin he just kind of drops or tosses ingredient containers gracelessly back onto the counter vs the way Venba would put them back down like a normal person. There’s a moment where you’re texting and the game is auto-advancing the conversation but once you’re given the freedom to exit the conversation you can actually scroll up and see the entire thing again, including the beginning chunk of it that you weren’t originally shown and it is as horrible as you would imagine. Venba is such a short game and its vignettes are necessarily so focused that this intimate attention to detail makes a huge difference in the texture of the world.
Applicability is very real, I suppose. On its face Venba is an incredibly generic immigrant story, with only the food angle making it stand out narratively, but even then it isn’t even the only “wholesome indie game about a second generation immigrant trying to reconnect somehow to a parent via family recipes” that I know of off the top of my head. We all know people who have lived the broad details of this family’s story. But the particular voices that come out of their mouths are bold and articulate and human. Enough for it to evoke specific traumas in my wife, who loved this game, enough to make me wistful about my relationship with her mother, which is occasionally complicated. And I know other people who have felt similarly. It’s easy for me to imagine a lesser version of this game and I’m glad I don’t have to talk about that one haha.
As I write this we’re four days into a six day visit from my wife’s dad, whom I often struggle to get along with, and who doesn’t know that I’m transgender, and her brother, who is cool but who left early this afternoon. Today has been the first time we’ve had a break from work or being around them constantly since they arrived. It’s been a long and stressful week, but getting a couple hours to play through this game was in turns relaxing and sad and fun and cathartic. And we’re about to go out to eat at a South Indian restaurant with her dad, which was a happy coincidence that we’ve had planned for a couple of weeks. I think we’re gonna go ham on some dosas. Maybe try not to cry about Venba while we do.
Castlevania Legends
1997
Castlevania has been kind of nothing but hits for me so far. I’ve found a lot to like in the popular series punching bags like Simon’s Quest, which has become probably a top ten video game for me, and The Adventure, which has become a game I will halfheartedly defend as actually fine when it comes up in casual conversation. Even popular games that I don’t get along with like Super IV and Symphony of the Night are obviously incredibly well done experiences, just ones that don’t rub me the right way. On average though I think Castlevania might have the highest hit rate of any series I’ve played this many entiries in bar like, Final Fantasy where (has not played 16 voice) I think literally every one is very good to great. So I came into Legends with a very open mind. Castlevania has basically never steered me wrong yet, I find myself more positive than average it seems, you get to play as a cool anime girl, and I’ve quite enjoyed the weird formal experiements that the limitations of the Gameboy hardware make necessary in these early portable entries. How could it POSSIBLY go wrong.
I’ll tell you how. I’ll tell you.
It’s subtle because Legends might not be obviously unpleasant if you were to just watch somebody play it. It looks FINE. It feels FINE. It’s level of challenge is FINE. It has a some interesting ideas – replacing subweapons with equippable magical powers that you earn by killing bosses, giving you the super saiyan mode that this game is most famous for, multiple endings determined by how well you explored the stage (sort of, we’ll get to it) – and I think some of the charm of the earlier Gameboy titles is still here, like in the way that they still apparently just can’t crack the code on making stairs on the Gameboy so all vertical movement happens via climbing up and down ropes.
The problem with Legends is that it’s so SWAGLESS, dude. They forgot to season my Castlevania, they just cooked it as it came and like yeah it’s well made and sure I can eat it but it doesn’t TASTE like anything! Everything feels like it’s been dialed way back from Belmont’s Revenge. Enemies aren’t as weird or interesting to look at, and there are no level gimmicks at all, let alone cool ones. The mega man level structure is gone too, which is fine too, but it does call attention to the way that even when we’ve returned to a traditional Storming Castlevania level structure here everything feels REALLY indistinct. There are familiar motifs to fall back on for this sort of thing by this point in the series but it doesn’t feel like Legends even really does that. The clock tower, for example, has gears and stuff in it, but the stuff that you’re DOING and the way you’re moving around and the guys you’re hitting don’t feel very different from the way all these things feel in the keep or the graveyard.
And while I applaud any time we try to do a lot of new cool shit, I think the new cool shit in this game is also the stuff that works the least when it all comes together. The way you get the good ending is to fully explore each level until you find a hidden artifact at the end of its alternate path (the items are classic Castlevania subweapons which is very goofy I have legitimately no idea what this is supposed to be signaling about the mythic value of these objects given this game’s position as the Origin Of All Castlevania), but the levels aren’t really structured in a way that makes finding them actually interesting or challenging. Every time you’re just going to come to a point where you have to arbitrarily decide which direction to go down and at some point you’re either going to luck into your key item OR you’re eventually going to hit the boss screen and because Legends has actually pretty rigorous checkpointing you’ll have basically beefed your chance to get the item for that level unless you intentionally burn through all of your lives upon your realization and play through the level again on a fresh continue. This game carries the beautiful Castlevania tradition of giving you infinite continues and electing to use one will just start you at the top of a level rather than your most recent checkpoint, and if you were to do a perfect run with no mistakes and no deaths the game maybe has an hour or 90 minutes of content so it’s not exactly a huge ask but it’s the kind of thing where it’s like why am I the one doing this work and making these excuses, why is the game set up in this tedious way?
They’re all like this. Burning Mode, you’re super sick hyper powerful mega mode, is basically just the button you hit to win fights, and you get to pop it once per stage at any time. It doesn’t refresh after you use it but it DOES refresh if you die, so it’s incredibly easy to just pop it on every single boss in the game. I would say that for more than half of the dudes you fight here, including Dracula, I don’t even know their patterns because I just made Sonia an unstoppable monster and hit them nine times before they could do literally anything.
The power system that replaces subweapons is interesting in theory, and I especially like the idea that they’re meted out with intentionality over the course of your linear progression through the stages, but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of reason towards the order they’re given to you. You get the equivalent of the stopwatch first, and it’s mondo cheap to use, which makes it the most useful power in the game by far. The general ease of the game coupled with the lax punishments for failure make your twenty-heart-cost full heal basically worthless, and by the time you get the one that deals damage to every enemy on the screen at once you have precious few trap rooms that sic tons of enemies on you left, which are the most dangerous screens in the game where that would offer the most utility. Coupled with the fact that the whip powerup system returns from previous Gameboy entries and you really do feel arguably the most equipped to kill that I’ve ever felt in Castlevania, but it feels like a LOT when all the guys you fight are like, skeletons who don’t seem to be aware that you’re there and wiggly ghosts.
There’s at least one interesting encounter here, in both a callback to the Soleil fight in Belmont’s Revenge and presumably a bit of nice brand synergy with the contemporaneously released Symphony of the Night, Alucard pops in halfway through the fifth stage to tell you to be like “uhgghhh my beloved, you’re so cool but this is my fight alone please let me go fight dracula by myself you’re too pure and sexy to fight a mean vampire” and Sonia is like “wow Alucard that’s so true I am a stupid loser baby woman wait hang on a second what the fuck that’s dumb” and then HE’S like “oh okay well allow me to test your STRENGTH” and then you have to fight him it sucks bro. But finally at least towards the end of the game there’s a one on one duel with a guy with good AI and an interesting moveset and ha ha I’m just kidding dude I immediately activated burning mode and destroyed him in six seconds before he could literally move or act at all.
To get back to how Castlevania Legends absolutely could not pick up anybody at the bar on account of an utter lack of girlswag, I’d like to complain about how this game looks and sounds, which again, isn’t BAD. In fact the first level is scored to a pretty good remix of Bloody Tears (simon’s quest’s strongest soldier logging on), replacing the drum part with a driving baseline, changing the way the NES version has the melody constantly ascend going into the “chorus” with a neat little minor key dip, and adding that patented gameboy soundchip Crunch that I love so much. It’s great. But then alllll the way until the Dracula fight itself which is another remix of an existing Castlevania song, everything is entirely forgettable, the most absolutely generic stomping through a dungeon type shit you could possibly imagine, or not imagine as the case may be because I sure as shit can’t recall a single note of it. And I don’t mean this in a “it doesn’t Sound Like Castlevania” way because neither of the previous GB Castlevanias really did either but I think Belmont’s Revenge lowkey has some of the best music in the series in there, often eerie and weird and entirely fitting the bold art choices that game was making.
Maybe that’s also part of the problem: Legends LOOKS bland. Not bad! Fine! Okay! Medium! There isn’t anything wrong here. I hate to be that guy who’s like “well why isn’t it as good as the other one” but a lot of the ways that Legends feels bad to me is as this itch under my skin, this way that it feels like you’re wearing your shoes on the wrong feet – like yeah sure I can walk around fine but pretty soon my feet do hurt and I am going to have blisters at the end of it. It’s just an ugly kind of fine. The suggestions of environments that are boring, the gravestones and brick walls and clock tower gears and scary trees all the most basic and unexciting versions of themselves artistically. Coming off of Belmont’s Revenge which I think might actually be the best looking Gameboy game I’ve ever seen, whose greatest strength might actually be how good and subtle and creepy its art is, it’s hard not to look at Dracula’s shitty little throne and be like...that’s where Dracula sits? Do you remember the gigantic, looming, ethereal skeletons and wavering scythes dotting the background in the leadup to Dracula’s room in Belmont’s Revenge? Do you remember how the castle itself was portrayed as a bulbous, insectoid monstrosity, as vile as its own inhabitants, radiating life as much as it did cruelty in Castlevania The Adventure? Where’s the fucking SAUCE, Legends?
Playing Legends right off of Symphony of the Night makes for an interesting juxtaposition, especially considering their American releases were almost right on top of each other. I really don’t like almost any part of the act of playing Symphony, but there is such a passion behind every single element of that game, it’s so overdesigned and lovingly rendered and weird and pulsing with this almost unquantifiable desire to exist. Legends is the exact opposite, a game that feels functionally completely fine to play but otherwise very tired, and bored, and uninterested in being there, which can’t even be true because there are innovations here. There are mixups on the Castlevania formula, a lot of them, and not only ones necessitated by the hardware they made the game for. Looking up the division of Konami that made this game, their first ever project was VANDAL HEARTS and then after that they make almost exclusively ports, sports games, and mobile adaptations of existing Konami franchises, like this. But this was early, it was their second full game. I wonder if they achieved their vision, or if they had a strong vision, or if this studio existed from the beginning to squeeze pennies out of the portable market, make as much money as they thought they could get from easy marks like sports or affection for stuff they already knew people liked.
It’s a bummer, man. It feels wrong that I’m saying all this shit about the game where you fuck Alucard Symphonyofthenight without a condom. Can you believe that? That I can say “Once there was a canon Castlevania game that revealed that Alucard is straight (lmao no wonder they got rid of this one) and he fucked a girl who goes super saiyan like goku from Dragon Ball and it is DEFINITIVELY the worst one in the series.” It’s unbelievable. Sonia deserved better. Can’t believe they cancelled her Dreamcast game. 3D Castlevania girl game launch title for the Sega Dreamcast would have fucked harder than any other game maybe ever forever. Konami has been ruining franchises for decades longer than any of us even realized. It’s so fucked.
NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA 64
LAST TIME: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT
I’ll tell you how. I’ll tell you.
It’s subtle because Legends might not be obviously unpleasant if you were to just watch somebody play it. It looks FINE. It feels FINE. It’s level of challenge is FINE. It has a some interesting ideas – replacing subweapons with equippable magical powers that you earn by killing bosses, giving you the super saiyan mode that this game is most famous for, multiple endings determined by how well you explored the stage (sort of, we’ll get to it) – and I think some of the charm of the earlier Gameboy titles is still here, like in the way that they still apparently just can’t crack the code on making stairs on the Gameboy so all vertical movement happens via climbing up and down ropes.
The problem with Legends is that it’s so SWAGLESS, dude. They forgot to season my Castlevania, they just cooked it as it came and like yeah it’s well made and sure I can eat it but it doesn’t TASTE like anything! Everything feels like it’s been dialed way back from Belmont’s Revenge. Enemies aren’t as weird or interesting to look at, and there are no level gimmicks at all, let alone cool ones. The mega man level structure is gone too, which is fine too, but it does call attention to the way that even when we’ve returned to a traditional Storming Castlevania level structure here everything feels REALLY indistinct. There are familiar motifs to fall back on for this sort of thing by this point in the series but it doesn’t feel like Legends even really does that. The clock tower, for example, has gears and stuff in it, but the stuff that you’re DOING and the way you’re moving around and the guys you’re hitting don’t feel very different from the way all these things feel in the keep or the graveyard.
And while I applaud any time we try to do a lot of new cool shit, I think the new cool shit in this game is also the stuff that works the least when it all comes together. The way you get the good ending is to fully explore each level until you find a hidden artifact at the end of its alternate path (the items are classic Castlevania subweapons which is very goofy I have legitimately no idea what this is supposed to be signaling about the mythic value of these objects given this game’s position as the Origin Of All Castlevania), but the levels aren’t really structured in a way that makes finding them actually interesting or challenging. Every time you’re just going to come to a point where you have to arbitrarily decide which direction to go down and at some point you’re either going to luck into your key item OR you’re eventually going to hit the boss screen and because Legends has actually pretty rigorous checkpointing you’ll have basically beefed your chance to get the item for that level unless you intentionally burn through all of your lives upon your realization and play through the level again on a fresh continue. This game carries the beautiful Castlevania tradition of giving you infinite continues and electing to use one will just start you at the top of a level rather than your most recent checkpoint, and if you were to do a perfect run with no mistakes and no deaths the game maybe has an hour or 90 minutes of content so it’s not exactly a huge ask but it’s the kind of thing where it’s like why am I the one doing this work and making these excuses, why is the game set up in this tedious way?
They’re all like this. Burning Mode, you’re super sick hyper powerful mega mode, is basically just the button you hit to win fights, and you get to pop it once per stage at any time. It doesn’t refresh after you use it but it DOES refresh if you die, so it’s incredibly easy to just pop it on every single boss in the game. I would say that for more than half of the dudes you fight here, including Dracula, I don’t even know their patterns because I just made Sonia an unstoppable monster and hit them nine times before they could do literally anything.
The power system that replaces subweapons is interesting in theory, and I especially like the idea that they’re meted out with intentionality over the course of your linear progression through the stages, but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of reason towards the order they’re given to you. You get the equivalent of the stopwatch first, and it’s mondo cheap to use, which makes it the most useful power in the game by far. The general ease of the game coupled with the lax punishments for failure make your twenty-heart-cost full heal basically worthless, and by the time you get the one that deals damage to every enemy on the screen at once you have precious few trap rooms that sic tons of enemies on you left, which are the most dangerous screens in the game where that would offer the most utility. Coupled with the fact that the whip powerup system returns from previous Gameboy entries and you really do feel arguably the most equipped to kill that I’ve ever felt in Castlevania, but it feels like a LOT when all the guys you fight are like, skeletons who don’t seem to be aware that you’re there and wiggly ghosts.
There’s at least one interesting encounter here, in both a callback to the Soleil fight in Belmont’s Revenge and presumably a bit of nice brand synergy with the contemporaneously released Symphony of the Night, Alucard pops in halfway through the fifth stage to tell you to be like “uhgghhh my beloved, you’re so cool but this is my fight alone please let me go fight dracula by myself you’re too pure and sexy to fight a mean vampire” and Sonia is like “wow Alucard that’s so true I am a stupid loser baby woman wait hang on a second what the fuck that’s dumb” and then HE’S like “oh okay well allow me to test your STRENGTH” and then you have to fight him it sucks bro. But finally at least towards the end of the game there’s a one on one duel with a guy with good AI and an interesting moveset and ha ha I’m just kidding dude I immediately activated burning mode and destroyed him in six seconds before he could literally move or act at all.
To get back to how Castlevania Legends absolutely could not pick up anybody at the bar on account of an utter lack of girlswag, I’d like to complain about how this game looks and sounds, which again, isn’t BAD. In fact the first level is scored to a pretty good remix of Bloody Tears (simon’s quest’s strongest soldier logging on), replacing the drum part with a driving baseline, changing the way the NES version has the melody constantly ascend going into the “chorus” with a neat little minor key dip, and adding that patented gameboy soundchip Crunch that I love so much. It’s great. But then alllll the way until the Dracula fight itself which is another remix of an existing Castlevania song, everything is entirely forgettable, the most absolutely generic stomping through a dungeon type shit you could possibly imagine, or not imagine as the case may be because I sure as shit can’t recall a single note of it. And I don’t mean this in a “it doesn’t Sound Like Castlevania” way because neither of the previous GB Castlevanias really did either but I think Belmont’s Revenge lowkey has some of the best music in the series in there, often eerie and weird and entirely fitting the bold art choices that game was making.
Maybe that’s also part of the problem: Legends LOOKS bland. Not bad! Fine! Okay! Medium! There isn’t anything wrong here. I hate to be that guy who’s like “well why isn’t it as good as the other one” but a lot of the ways that Legends feels bad to me is as this itch under my skin, this way that it feels like you’re wearing your shoes on the wrong feet – like yeah sure I can walk around fine but pretty soon my feet do hurt and I am going to have blisters at the end of it. It’s just an ugly kind of fine. The suggestions of environments that are boring, the gravestones and brick walls and clock tower gears and scary trees all the most basic and unexciting versions of themselves artistically. Coming off of Belmont’s Revenge which I think might actually be the best looking Gameboy game I’ve ever seen, whose greatest strength might actually be how good and subtle and creepy its art is, it’s hard not to look at Dracula’s shitty little throne and be like...that’s where Dracula sits? Do you remember the gigantic, looming, ethereal skeletons and wavering scythes dotting the background in the leadup to Dracula’s room in Belmont’s Revenge? Do you remember how the castle itself was portrayed as a bulbous, insectoid monstrosity, as vile as its own inhabitants, radiating life as much as it did cruelty in Castlevania The Adventure? Where’s the fucking SAUCE, Legends?
Playing Legends right off of Symphony of the Night makes for an interesting juxtaposition, especially considering their American releases were almost right on top of each other. I really don’t like almost any part of the act of playing Symphony, but there is such a passion behind every single element of that game, it’s so overdesigned and lovingly rendered and weird and pulsing with this almost unquantifiable desire to exist. Legends is the exact opposite, a game that feels functionally completely fine to play but otherwise very tired, and bored, and uninterested in being there, which can’t even be true because there are innovations here. There are mixups on the Castlevania formula, a lot of them, and not only ones necessitated by the hardware they made the game for. Looking up the division of Konami that made this game, their first ever project was VANDAL HEARTS and then after that they make almost exclusively ports, sports games, and mobile adaptations of existing Konami franchises, like this. But this was early, it was their second full game. I wonder if they achieved their vision, or if they had a strong vision, or if this studio existed from the beginning to squeeze pennies out of the portable market, make as much money as they thought they could get from easy marks like sports or affection for stuff they already knew people liked.
It’s a bummer, man. It feels wrong that I’m saying all this shit about the game where you fuck Alucard Symphonyofthenight without a condom. Can you believe that? That I can say “Once there was a canon Castlevania game that revealed that Alucard is straight (lmao no wonder they got rid of this one) and he fucked a girl who goes super saiyan like goku from Dragon Ball and it is DEFINITIVELY the worst one in the series.” It’s unbelievable. Sonia deserved better. Can’t believe they cancelled her Dreamcast game. 3D Castlevania girl game launch title for the Sega Dreamcast would have fucked harder than any other game maybe ever forever. Konami has been ruining franchises for decades longer than any of us even realized. It’s so fucked.
NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA 64
LAST TIME: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT
I never liked dungeon type rpgs very much growing up. I was a really story-focused gamer even in my youth and I didn’t love super fiddly systems stuff so anything more complicated than like a Bioware system was a pretty hard pass from me, and a lot of those games didn’t even have the types of really overt narratives that I preferred anyway. My love for Stories In Games hasn’t gone away but a perusal through my backloggd account will tell anyone that I’ve broadened the scope of where I look for them. I’ve also really blown out my tastes for what kinds of games I’ll play, and my experience with Dungeon Encounters in 2022, which I would describe as nothing less than euphoric from start to finish, activated a thirst for this specific type of tile-based rpg in me. I played Phantasy Star (or, most of it) around that time too and found myself completely enchanted by the first-person dungeons in that game, even as bare as they were there.
So I’ve found myself, as I often do, back towards the beginning of things. I’m not going to talk directly about the mechanics, about the act of playing Wizardry on your keyboard or controller, because Cadensia has already done that here so much better than I would have and I think anybody interested in what it feels like to Play Wizardry who doesn’t somehow already know should read her piece on it, it’s really good.
I found myself thinking about The Story in Wizardry a lot while I was playing it. The narrative is, I think, the most interesting thing about the game by far. But I was also thinking a lot about how all I had ever heard about this game and indeed this whole genre that it spawned was that they eschew narrative in favor of taking inspiration from the more mechanically minded, number crunching side of the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons. And that’s true, right, there aren’t narrative scenes in Wizardry, people aren’t talking to you, there aren’t really NPCs the way we think about them today. And this remains true today today – I’m a solid few hours into Etrian Odyssey right now, a game that so famously Doesn’t Have A Story that its remake would add a game mode that gave your party bespoke character art and personalities and dialogue and insert a much stronger narrative structure into the game as it existed. One of the major selling points of the even more recent and very popular Labyrinth series by Nippon Ichi Software is that they have their developer’s signature long, elaborate, dialogue-heavy stories. All kinds of scenes where one guy stands on one side of the screen and another guy stands on the other side of the screen and they go back and forth in the text box in those games.
But in playing these games I’m finding this to be a really weird understanding of what’s happening here. Etrian Odyssey is a game drenched in story. DRIPPING with incidental dialogue from the MANY characters who live in the base town at the top of the labyrinth, which changes constantly as you continue to descend, and all of whom are extensively characterized across various missions and side quests in which you interact with them. You’re constantly encountering other people within the labyrinth itself, and often get a choice of how to express yourself to them. There are little encounters sprinkled throughout the dungeon, where often you’re making a choice as small as whether you want to take a short break or pluck a piece of fruit you’ve found or investigate a rustling in the brush; rarely do these moments have huge effects but every time they are lending your characters, your environment, and your situations deeper context and personality. The game is full of narration, gorgeous prose that so expertly communicates wonder and danger, which both loom constantly in equal measure. There are immediate hints of a greater mystery at play regarding the circumstances of the dungeon’s existence and hints that other people already know what’s going on and purposely withhold information from you, to mysterious ends. This isn’t “no story.” This is “the girl on the boxart doesn’t talk about her backstory if I choose to play as her.” This is players not doing their half of the work. Which is fine! We don’t have to want to be active participants in every part of what a game’s doing. But we shouldn’t accuse games of having failures when what we’re actually doing is disagreeing with a style.
Anyway so like, Wizardry. The thing about it is. It’s fucking sick. THE PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD holy shit dude. Something I didn’t know before I played this game is that the mad overlord isn’t the guy you decapitate at the end but in fact a fucking loser ass king who has shoved you into the dungeon forever until you get his necklace back for him from a tricky little guy or die trying. IT BEGINS right like yeah you gotta read the manual to get the Good Good flavor but oh baby the flavor is hits. Fuckin Trebor what an asshole. His magic amulet is stolen by the evil wizard Werdna and a gigantic evil dungeon appears beneath his castle and he’s like hmm yes I will pretend this evil dungeon is here on purpose. Now everybody has to go die in the dungeon. If you get out of the dungeon with my amulet you get to be my bodyguards for life also you can’t turn that job down.
This immediately paints everything about the game in A Light. Given the time this came out, and its audience, and the guys who made it, most of this is cast in a fun light, like oh the place you buy your equipment is run by a funny fantasy dwarf who would sell you your own arms if he thought he could get away with it hoo hoo hoo (the manual goes out of its way to clarify that it means your body arms and not your weapons in fact). The castle is always bustling with activity, and there are always new adventurers at the pub to refresh your party with or uh, make a new one if you fucking wipe in the dungeon. At the same time though, the act of play itself creates a dour scenario for us. It’s brutal down there, no doubt about it. A punishing grind, one that kills and demeans the poor losers who find themselves trapped here at every turn. Adventurers have free reign to come and go from the labyrinth as they please because, after all, they don’t seem to have the freedom to leave the castle town itself. Every step could bring you into conflict with some monster or shade or even other guys, and who knows what their deals are? Other adventurers, given up on their hope of conventional success? You run into a lot of wizards but their relationship to Werdna is unclear, especially on these upper floors.
This is how you live now, though, and it’s here that the mechanics of the game that I see almost universally complained about create richness for this emergent narrative of tedious despair that felt most appropriate for my parties. It’s so, so, so easy to die, in the dungeon. If your friends can lug you back out then great news, you live in dungeons and dragons and the priests over at the Temple of Cant can revive you but like, only maybe, and fuck dude it costs a LOT of money to try. They mention these prices have been going up. They used to be tithes. Makes you wonder if these economies, not just the exploitative services run by the church but the pub, the armorer, if this little bubble is a result of the Mad Overlord’s perpetually trapping of adventurers into his death maze or if it was only made worse by it. If they fuck it up and you’re lost in death forever you uh, don’t get your money back.
Money essentially loses all meaning so quickly, which is bad news because it’s like the single extrinsic motivator your characters have for exploring; there’s a huge cash payout when you find your triumph, and your dubious final reward is a supposedly lucrative position of honor and prestige. But you’ll find yourself drowning in gold with nothing to spend it on before long. The shit at the weapons shop can barely handle a couple floors worth of enemy scaling, and all else there really is to buy are resurrections and other permanent status cures. By now though you’re empowered enough that you’ll need them less and less often.
That means there’s less and less incentive to spend time in town, and more and more to spend time in the dungeon. Deeper, darker, more twisted up. More disoriented. Meeting more guys who start to look more like you. Ghosts. And monsters are friendly as often as not! They’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. That’s up to you, though. Something that’s undeniable is that you’re getting old down here. Every time you stay at the inn in town the game suggests that this isn’t a night of rest but an extended period of time out of the dungeon. These aren’t brief trips in and out. You make camp every time before you go down, you’re in there for a Long Time and when you come out you need to recover. Your characters age, and if you let them they’ll age substantially over time. When you change their classes it takes them three or four years to learn their new trade. Sometimes stats get lower when they level up. They’re getting old. They can die of old age! You might have to make a bunch of new guys because your old guys were Literal old guys who fucking died from being in the dungeon too long, at the behest of a cruel king but without the magics that grant him and his adversary power and longevity.
When you do this, if you do this, making new parties for any reason, such as stepping on a trap that teleports you into a location that makes your body impossible to recover such as into the castle moat or the inside of a rock wall, there is created a sense of generational knowledge, that old guard adventurers pass homemade maps and wisdom on how traps work and how to fight certain enemies to the new suckers who find themselves trapped here. After all, you’re making those maps in your notebook, and you’re keeping tabs on which enemies have fucking permanent level drain skills. Your new guys don’t learn that from nowhere. And you’re making Guys, definitively, like you name them and shit, they’re people. At least, they’re what you bring to them.
I bring a lot to this game. We can’t forget either that this is still this game where the two big evil guys are named Trebor and Werdna, the names of the game’s two developers, Robert and Andrew, spelled backwards. This is funny, this is a funny thing to do. There’s nothing intrinsically dark about the game beyond perhaps the oppressive feeling of claustrophobia that its main setting naturally implies, and indeed you’re always running into funny little tablets that read more like bits of graffiti or troll posts than they do ominous inscriptions. I can’t stop thinking about how when you fight Werdna he’s joined by a Vampire Lord and some normal vampires like what was going on were you guys just hanging out were you playing halo 3 did I crash the party. But it’s easy for me to pull all these elements into what felt like the story that was coming together for me, too.
I do think it’s worth mentioning also that while I did actually finish the NES version of this game I spent a significant amount of time poking around with the DOS, Gameboy Color, and PS1 editions of Wizardy as well, and all of these have very different renditions of this world and its environments and creatures and sounds. The PS1 version is by far the most self-serious, the one that at first glance lends itself the most the story that Wizardry and I told together, but something about the near-monochrome of the NES, the encompassing blackness of the screen at almost all times, and the way that it’s so much easier to completely lose your sense of place in the dungeon that made me feel so much more afraid than I ever did in the comparatively earthy and well-lit early floors of the Playstation version.
My point, at the end of all this, is that all that stuff is there for the reading at all. It’s been there the whole time, waiting to be engaged with. Wizardy isn’t a deep game really at all. Especially given how influential it is on all modern video games but especially turn based RPGs, it’s THE template for over 40 years now, and beyond the act of physically mapping your own shit while adapting to some often comically mean-spirited traps, the part where you get into fights never ever amounts to more than grinding until your number is bigger and you know more spells. But that didn’t matter to me. I had a great time with Wizardry, entirely down to the atmosphere that was in no small part created by how brutally terse that mechanical crunch felt. I don’t know if when I play Wizardry II it will be this version or if I’ll fully jump ship to the Playstation and its automap features, but for the experience I got these last few months with this game I wouldn’t trade any of that friction for anything, and I wouldn’t put any cutscenes in a remake either.
So I’ve found myself, as I often do, back towards the beginning of things. I’m not going to talk directly about the mechanics, about the act of playing Wizardry on your keyboard or controller, because Cadensia has already done that here so much better than I would have and I think anybody interested in what it feels like to Play Wizardry who doesn’t somehow already know should read her piece on it, it’s really good.
I found myself thinking about The Story in Wizardry a lot while I was playing it. The narrative is, I think, the most interesting thing about the game by far. But I was also thinking a lot about how all I had ever heard about this game and indeed this whole genre that it spawned was that they eschew narrative in favor of taking inspiration from the more mechanically minded, number crunching side of the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons. And that’s true, right, there aren’t narrative scenes in Wizardry, people aren’t talking to you, there aren’t really NPCs the way we think about them today. And this remains true today today – I’m a solid few hours into Etrian Odyssey right now, a game that so famously Doesn’t Have A Story that its remake would add a game mode that gave your party bespoke character art and personalities and dialogue and insert a much stronger narrative structure into the game as it existed. One of the major selling points of the even more recent and very popular Labyrinth series by Nippon Ichi Software is that they have their developer’s signature long, elaborate, dialogue-heavy stories. All kinds of scenes where one guy stands on one side of the screen and another guy stands on the other side of the screen and they go back and forth in the text box in those games.
But in playing these games I’m finding this to be a really weird understanding of what’s happening here. Etrian Odyssey is a game drenched in story. DRIPPING with incidental dialogue from the MANY characters who live in the base town at the top of the labyrinth, which changes constantly as you continue to descend, and all of whom are extensively characterized across various missions and side quests in which you interact with them. You’re constantly encountering other people within the labyrinth itself, and often get a choice of how to express yourself to them. There are little encounters sprinkled throughout the dungeon, where often you’re making a choice as small as whether you want to take a short break or pluck a piece of fruit you’ve found or investigate a rustling in the brush; rarely do these moments have huge effects but every time they are lending your characters, your environment, and your situations deeper context and personality. The game is full of narration, gorgeous prose that so expertly communicates wonder and danger, which both loom constantly in equal measure. There are immediate hints of a greater mystery at play regarding the circumstances of the dungeon’s existence and hints that other people already know what’s going on and purposely withhold information from you, to mysterious ends. This isn’t “no story.” This is “the girl on the boxart doesn’t talk about her backstory if I choose to play as her.” This is players not doing their half of the work. Which is fine! We don’t have to want to be active participants in every part of what a game’s doing. But we shouldn’t accuse games of having failures when what we’re actually doing is disagreeing with a style.
Anyway so like, Wizardry. The thing about it is. It’s fucking sick. THE PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD holy shit dude. Something I didn’t know before I played this game is that the mad overlord isn’t the guy you decapitate at the end but in fact a fucking loser ass king who has shoved you into the dungeon forever until you get his necklace back for him from a tricky little guy or die trying. IT BEGINS right like yeah you gotta read the manual to get the Good Good flavor but oh baby the flavor is hits. Fuckin Trebor what an asshole. His magic amulet is stolen by the evil wizard Werdna and a gigantic evil dungeon appears beneath his castle and he’s like hmm yes I will pretend this evil dungeon is here on purpose. Now everybody has to go die in the dungeon. If you get out of the dungeon with my amulet you get to be my bodyguards for life also you can’t turn that job down.
This immediately paints everything about the game in A Light. Given the time this came out, and its audience, and the guys who made it, most of this is cast in a fun light, like oh the place you buy your equipment is run by a funny fantasy dwarf who would sell you your own arms if he thought he could get away with it hoo hoo hoo (the manual goes out of its way to clarify that it means your body arms and not your weapons in fact). The castle is always bustling with activity, and there are always new adventurers at the pub to refresh your party with or uh, make a new one if you fucking wipe in the dungeon. At the same time though, the act of play itself creates a dour scenario for us. It’s brutal down there, no doubt about it. A punishing grind, one that kills and demeans the poor losers who find themselves trapped here at every turn. Adventurers have free reign to come and go from the labyrinth as they please because, after all, they don’t seem to have the freedom to leave the castle town itself. Every step could bring you into conflict with some monster or shade or even other guys, and who knows what their deals are? Other adventurers, given up on their hope of conventional success? You run into a lot of wizards but their relationship to Werdna is unclear, especially on these upper floors.
This is how you live now, though, and it’s here that the mechanics of the game that I see almost universally complained about create richness for this emergent narrative of tedious despair that felt most appropriate for my parties. It’s so, so, so easy to die, in the dungeon. If your friends can lug you back out then great news, you live in dungeons and dragons and the priests over at the Temple of Cant can revive you but like, only maybe, and fuck dude it costs a LOT of money to try. They mention these prices have been going up. They used to be tithes. Makes you wonder if these economies, not just the exploitative services run by the church but the pub, the armorer, if this little bubble is a result of the Mad Overlord’s perpetually trapping of adventurers into his death maze or if it was only made worse by it. If they fuck it up and you’re lost in death forever you uh, don’t get your money back.
Money essentially loses all meaning so quickly, which is bad news because it’s like the single extrinsic motivator your characters have for exploring; there’s a huge cash payout when you find your triumph, and your dubious final reward is a supposedly lucrative position of honor and prestige. But you’ll find yourself drowning in gold with nothing to spend it on before long. The shit at the weapons shop can barely handle a couple floors worth of enemy scaling, and all else there really is to buy are resurrections and other permanent status cures. By now though you’re empowered enough that you’ll need them less and less often.
That means there’s less and less incentive to spend time in town, and more and more to spend time in the dungeon. Deeper, darker, more twisted up. More disoriented. Meeting more guys who start to look more like you. Ghosts. And monsters are friendly as often as not! They’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. That’s up to you, though. Something that’s undeniable is that you’re getting old down here. Every time you stay at the inn in town the game suggests that this isn’t a night of rest but an extended period of time out of the dungeon. These aren’t brief trips in and out. You make camp every time before you go down, you’re in there for a Long Time and when you come out you need to recover. Your characters age, and if you let them they’ll age substantially over time. When you change their classes it takes them three or four years to learn their new trade. Sometimes stats get lower when they level up. They’re getting old. They can die of old age! You might have to make a bunch of new guys because your old guys were Literal old guys who fucking died from being in the dungeon too long, at the behest of a cruel king but without the magics that grant him and his adversary power and longevity.
When you do this, if you do this, making new parties for any reason, such as stepping on a trap that teleports you into a location that makes your body impossible to recover such as into the castle moat or the inside of a rock wall, there is created a sense of generational knowledge, that old guard adventurers pass homemade maps and wisdom on how traps work and how to fight certain enemies to the new suckers who find themselves trapped here. After all, you’re making those maps in your notebook, and you’re keeping tabs on which enemies have fucking permanent level drain skills. Your new guys don’t learn that from nowhere. And you’re making Guys, definitively, like you name them and shit, they’re people. At least, they’re what you bring to them.
I bring a lot to this game. We can’t forget either that this is still this game where the two big evil guys are named Trebor and Werdna, the names of the game’s two developers, Robert and Andrew, spelled backwards. This is funny, this is a funny thing to do. There’s nothing intrinsically dark about the game beyond perhaps the oppressive feeling of claustrophobia that its main setting naturally implies, and indeed you’re always running into funny little tablets that read more like bits of graffiti or troll posts than they do ominous inscriptions. I can’t stop thinking about how when you fight Werdna he’s joined by a Vampire Lord and some normal vampires like what was going on were you guys just hanging out were you playing halo 3 did I crash the party. But it’s easy for me to pull all these elements into what felt like the story that was coming together for me, too.
I do think it’s worth mentioning also that while I did actually finish the NES version of this game I spent a significant amount of time poking around with the DOS, Gameboy Color, and PS1 editions of Wizardy as well, and all of these have very different renditions of this world and its environments and creatures and sounds. The PS1 version is by far the most self-serious, the one that at first glance lends itself the most the story that Wizardry and I told together, but something about the near-monochrome of the NES, the encompassing blackness of the screen at almost all times, and the way that it’s so much easier to completely lose your sense of place in the dungeon that made me feel so much more afraid than I ever did in the comparatively earthy and well-lit early floors of the Playstation version.
My point, at the end of all this, is that all that stuff is there for the reading at all. It’s been there the whole time, waiting to be engaged with. Wizardy isn’t a deep game really at all. Especially given how influential it is on all modern video games but especially turn based RPGs, it’s THE template for over 40 years now, and beyond the act of physically mapping your own shit while adapting to some often comically mean-spirited traps, the part where you get into fights never ever amounts to more than grinding until your number is bigger and you know more spells. But that didn’t matter to me. I had a great time with Wizardry, entirely down to the atmosphere that was in no small part created by how brutally terse that mechanical crunch felt. I don’t know if when I play Wizardry II it will be this version or if I’ll fully jump ship to the Playstation and its automap features, but for the experience I got these last few months with this game I wouldn’t trade any of that friction for anything, and I wouldn’t put any cutscenes in a remake either.
What if....
What if you had one chance to use the secret art of resurrecting the dead?
Yes, if you had the power to bring someone back to life, one time and one time only...!
What would you do?
Paranormasight, while not entirely grasping the reigns on its horror theming, has still grown to be one of my favorite mystery virtual novels behind Ace Attorney. I would like to thank fellow backloggd user Cadensia for encouraging me to play this game, her incredible review is worth the read regardless if youre interested in playing. Paranormasight is most definitley the most ambitious and fresh feeling game I have played in a while, taking several new concepts i have never encountered before and turning them into a distinct style of VN that leaves me desperate to see more of. While i generally feel like some of these concepts had more potential, each and every aspect of this game is thoroughly utilized near constantly. It is a game that never became boring, predictable. Every little thing from the flavor text to the menus was purposeful and smart. It is a thinking game, a very intelligent game that had me on a hook until the very end. The 360° Google Earth-like camera in particular fascinated me, it is an absolutely ingenious idea for both a horror and mystery VN alike. Though, with the horror aspect, i feel my biggest disappointment lies.
I will be honest, this games biggest strength is its intelligent character writing, artwork, and unconventional puzzle solutions. More on the topic of the characters in the next paragraph, but i feel like the scary aspects of this game are left woefully untouched from how tense the opening route was. The 360 camera control was anxiety inducing, having to manually swing your head around to investigate left me feeling incredibly open and vulnerable. Your character has a back, a place they cannot see, and the game takes full advantage of that fact both in terms of puzzle solving and well earned jumpscares. A core part of the game revolves around an object called a curse stone. Each carries its own unique curse with its own requirements to set off, kill enough people with it and you can access the Rite of Resurrection. The first part of this game had such a unique idea, trying to figure out other curse bearer's abilities while also attempting to discard them with your own. Its ingenious, and not to mention that Paranormasight is one of the few games that does 4th wall breaking well, with many of the puzzle solutions being something only the player can access. As the game goes on and new protagonists are introduced with their own curse abilities, i thought the entire game would be centered around the smart use of these stones to aid in storytelling. Deciding if one should or should not use their stone to take someones life seems like a given when it comes to a game with a story chart, though unfortunately once day breaks this entire mechanic is dropped mostly all together along with the outright horror atmosphere (though the game remains very tense). The rest of Paranormasight is not bad by any means, but i do really wish there were more scares set up with the paranormal element.
Yes, if you are interested in this game please know that it shouldnt be solely for a scary time. Paranormasight's largest strength by far is its stellar wriitng and excellent visual direcrion. This is absolutely the most important paragraph in my review, because i just cant underestimate how wonderful this game's writing is. So many games- even ones centered around reading- fail to break the mold in any capacity; not as well written as a book, not interesting as a game. So many character stereotypes rehashed again and again, both in writing and design. Paranormasight's writing takes on a completely new charisma of its own... character dynamics I have never seen depicted before, realized in such a grounded way that feels real and tangible. I was constantly endeared and amazed by it. Its hard to describe, but its almost like a person you might meet in your actual life: there is no defining them or their actions by only a few descriptive traits. Gone are the days where we have such thrilling VN characters such as Girl (crazy mean though attractive) or Girl (shy) or High School Boy Jersey Jacket (jock) and his friend High School Boy Glasses (he is smart).
Paranormasight is where it's at, from a gay private detective to a man who is struggling very much trying to explain his babied wife, it does not leave one wanting for diversity. The premise of the mystery is also consistently present, always leaving you thinking and hanging on each and every word. But more than anything i am deeply thankful and touched by the delivery of the female cast. Its something i dont expect from any video game whatsoever, nonetheless a Square Enix title. Half the characters in this game are women, and theyre all so wonderful. Visually distinct... they all have different features and styles, down to the way their bodies are shaped. They're all nuanced and contained in a way that is exactly equal to writing and positions male charactes recieve. They are interesting, cunning, thinking and endearing. They are shown to me as human people, and this is an incredibly rare thing to behold in any artistic medium. I am very very happy i played this game to see such a thing, once more i can not understate just how thoughtful and interactive the writing is.
Paranormasight a very precious game in the world of virtual novels (my new term) and a very exciting one. I hope this team gets to make more of whatever genre they feel like venturing into with a proper budget, but in my opinion even with limited resources they already shot 99% of horror/mystery VNs out of the water. This game will leave a very large impression on me for a long time. I already miss my gay detective and rugged school girl friends.
What if you had one chance to use the secret art of resurrecting the dead?
Yes, if you had the power to bring someone back to life, one time and one time only...!
What would you do?
Paranormasight, while not entirely grasping the reigns on its horror theming, has still grown to be one of my favorite mystery virtual novels behind Ace Attorney. I would like to thank fellow backloggd user Cadensia for encouraging me to play this game, her incredible review is worth the read regardless if youre interested in playing. Paranormasight is most definitley the most ambitious and fresh feeling game I have played in a while, taking several new concepts i have never encountered before and turning them into a distinct style of VN that leaves me desperate to see more of. While i generally feel like some of these concepts had more potential, each and every aspect of this game is thoroughly utilized near constantly. It is a game that never became boring, predictable. Every little thing from the flavor text to the menus was purposeful and smart. It is a thinking game, a very intelligent game that had me on a hook until the very end. The 360° Google Earth-like camera in particular fascinated me, it is an absolutely ingenious idea for both a horror and mystery VN alike. Though, with the horror aspect, i feel my biggest disappointment lies.
I will be honest, this games biggest strength is its intelligent character writing, artwork, and unconventional puzzle solutions. More on the topic of the characters in the next paragraph, but i feel like the scary aspects of this game are left woefully untouched from how tense the opening route was. The 360 camera control was anxiety inducing, having to manually swing your head around to investigate left me feeling incredibly open and vulnerable. Your character has a back, a place they cannot see, and the game takes full advantage of that fact both in terms of puzzle solving and well earned jumpscares. A core part of the game revolves around an object called a curse stone. Each carries its own unique curse with its own requirements to set off, kill enough people with it and you can access the Rite of Resurrection. The first part of this game had such a unique idea, trying to figure out other curse bearer's abilities while also attempting to discard them with your own. Its ingenious, and not to mention that Paranormasight is one of the few games that does 4th wall breaking well, with many of the puzzle solutions being something only the player can access. As the game goes on and new protagonists are introduced with their own curse abilities, i thought the entire game would be centered around the smart use of these stones to aid in storytelling. Deciding if one should or should not use their stone to take someones life seems like a given when it comes to a game with a story chart, though unfortunately once day breaks this entire mechanic is dropped mostly all together along with the outright horror atmosphere (though the game remains very tense). The rest of Paranormasight is not bad by any means, but i do really wish there were more scares set up with the paranormal element.
Yes, if you are interested in this game please know that it shouldnt be solely for a scary time. Paranormasight's largest strength by far is its stellar wriitng and excellent visual direcrion. This is absolutely the most important paragraph in my review, because i just cant underestimate how wonderful this game's writing is. So many games- even ones centered around reading- fail to break the mold in any capacity; not as well written as a book, not interesting as a game. So many character stereotypes rehashed again and again, both in writing and design. Paranormasight's writing takes on a completely new charisma of its own... character dynamics I have never seen depicted before, realized in such a grounded way that feels real and tangible. I was constantly endeared and amazed by it. Its hard to describe, but its almost like a person you might meet in your actual life: there is no defining them or their actions by only a few descriptive traits. Gone are the days where we have such thrilling VN characters such as Girl (crazy mean though attractive) or Girl (shy) or High School Boy Jersey Jacket (jock) and his friend High School Boy Glasses (he is smart).
Paranormasight is where it's at, from a gay private detective to a man who is struggling very much trying to explain his babied wife, it does not leave one wanting for diversity. The premise of the mystery is also consistently present, always leaving you thinking and hanging on each and every word. But more than anything i am deeply thankful and touched by the delivery of the female cast. Its something i dont expect from any video game whatsoever, nonetheless a Square Enix title. Half the characters in this game are women, and theyre all so wonderful. Visually distinct... they all have different features and styles, down to the way their bodies are shaped. They're all nuanced and contained in a way that is exactly equal to writing and positions male charactes recieve. They are interesting, cunning, thinking and endearing. They are shown to me as human people, and this is an incredibly rare thing to behold in any artistic medium. I am very very happy i played this game to see such a thing, once more i can not understate just how thoughtful and interactive the writing is.
Paranormasight a very precious game in the world of virtual novels (my new term) and a very exciting one. I hope this team gets to make more of whatever genre they feel like venturing into with a proper budget, but in my opinion even with limited resources they already shot 99% of horror/mystery VNs out of the water. This game will leave a very large impression on me for a long time. I already miss my gay detective and rugged school girl friends.
Dragon Age: Origins
2009
Will always find it ironic that one of my first exposures to the world of cRPG was on the Xbox 360 port, done by Edge Of Reality. It’s fine enough, but you really should just get it on its initial PC format nowadays, cause it’s a buggy game no matter what and mods will be able to ameliorate, or at least alleviate, most of the problems. It’s not as overbearing as KOTOR1’s steps, but not as lenient and (comparatively) straightforward as Jade Empire’s. Firstly, while Steam isn’t missing any of the essential DLCs, it does lack all the promo items that are bundled in the GOG or even Origin “EA App” versions, so if you’re extremely meticulous about having all DLCs and/or want to make the game a lot easier (seriously some of these are rather OP), follow this guide first and foremost, then install the following: FtG Ui Mod for easier readability; Qwinn’s Ultimate DAO Fixpack, both the main file and the hotfix, for the most extensive fanpatch available; Dain’s Fixes for even more sprucing up on top of that (just the Core and Bug Fixes folder for duct-taping issues, but you can nab the other folders after examining them if you want); a 4GB EXE patch to address the game’s memory leak issue, which Steam users need to follow this install guide on; and finally, Shale’s Talents Fixes Only so that party member Shale’s talents actually function properly. There’s four others I used, but they’re not essentials and are more so recommendations for special cases, such as DLC Item Integration for one example, so I’ll mention them when appropriate. Word to the wise, there’s two types of installs, so it’s imperative that you read the description to know which one you’re doing, alongside any important details to avoid issues.
====================================================================================
BioWare has always been a place where its employees implant their influences into their releases, Dragon Age Origins being no different. Its setting and worldbuilding blend epic and dark fantasy series like Lord Of The Rings and A Song Of Fire And Ice, with obvious callbacks to their roots of creating the Baldur’s Gate duology several years prior. Thing is, it’s also a title developed in about 7 years, and it shows in an egregious fashion. Drafts of ideas being abound but never coming to fruition, such as other origin points for Humans shot down before they were able to go anywhere, Morrigan being the narrator with an expanded Dark Ritual scenario becoming truncated or excised, Grey Wardens and Darkspawn weren’t elements conceived of at first, fictional languages for different races, with help from Wolf Wikeley once again, having to be tossed aside and altered after not panning out well, chaotic rumblings affecting the production and prototype process amongst other roadblocks like whether or not multiplayer should be implemented, hell originally the dragons part of the title weren’t gonna be a thing, yet they were retrofitted onto the story thanks to a name generator giving them ideas, and Thedas being born as the community forum’s shorthand for, well, THE Dragon Age Setting. This notion and wounded stitch can also be felt within the game: an influence system, forgoing the studio’s rising penchant for morality, has systemic benefits for your bonded partners while intense friction can allow them to leave permanently, but with how easy it is to accrue gifts and approval points, and no equal benefits to outweigh the immense drawbacks, there’s little reason to act as enraged towards them; the Broken Circle arc fundamentally has two dungeons, one you’re actively doing as you climb to the top, and another that appears right before the end enacted by a Sloth Demon’s hypnotic spell, that sprawls and elongates the venture to such a degree that those who replay it - myself included - elect to installing the Skip The Fade mod, reaping all the benefits while downscaling all the story bits to the absolute essentials; the Orzammar Assembly has options to coerce higher ups into swaying on the side of either Bhelen or Harrowmont, yet it’s all for naught since this arc ends with you gifting a crown that cements the new ruling; Brecilian Forest and the Denerim Alienage both have strong prologues to help lay the groundwork of worldbuilding and roleplaying potential, yet their inclusion in regards to the main story reeks of either undercooked ideas with any threads to the Dalish Elf’s encampment snipped and handwaved as “a different group”, or an excuse to help the player and their allies progress the Landsmeet plot while giving the City Elf’s birthplace an involved cog in the machine. Even the Dog you recruit, with its maxed influence, niche talent pools, and ho-hum stat fills that seems to have suffered from aborted experimentation and ideas, affecting the combat balance to such little degree that I used the Extra Dog Slot and Dog Gift Tweaks mods with marginal or no errors having cropped up during my entire session. Those are just the ones I can immediately recall, but there’s several more at the forefront.
Even the worldbuilding aspect comes across as moot, containing little deviations and idiosyncrasies that can carve out the title’s unique identity. The prevailing wound bled from all that time spent trying to get the idea a foundation, and it results in executions of tried-and-true cliches at their most bare, few deviations being done to give itself a mein. For the matriarchal belief and religion that Andraste had inspired, there exists Ferelden’s Chantry sect that is very easily inferred as controlling and seclusionary upon the mages. For the caste-based system and underground dwelling that gives the Dwarves a position to call their own, the Elves’ divide between nature and (sub)urban assimilation begins to sketch its mark yet again. It’s not inaccurate to say that DAO’s fantasy outings are “generic”, but it’s perhaps more accurate to say that it isn’t carved enough for genre enthusiasts to sink their teeth into, such as how the Fade exists and intertwines itself with the living or the near-fatalistic ideology that is shared amongst the Qunari, various DLC add-ons upholding that void instead. Also humanoid presentations are just kinda ugly but at this point I feel like that’s just a small issue. I haven't come across an entirely finished title this blatantly troubled and cobbled together since replaying Wind Waker last year. Thing is, much like that game, I'm willing to overlook past all that because the ADVENTURE is pretty damn sick. Bioware writing during this era had one best aspect coupled by the worst. KOTOR1's pacing is sublime and is likely the easiest to (re)play, but the story is so plattered with corn and cheese it makes some of the more awkward moments in the prequels and other Bioware titles become Shakespearian; Jade Empire has an immensely captivating and intricate world and villain, but it's dragged down by hollowed out moments with uncomplacent companions; Mass Effect 1 has the strongest sense of cohesion and scale, yet its lackluster side material holds it back. DAO, meanwhile, pretty comfortably captures that rampant and scattershot feel a TTRPG session has, especially since I recently dabbled into D&D and Pathfinder campaigns.
Despite all my rabbles and censures, David Gaider and his writing cohorts did a superb job at formulating the usual serial TV pacing into the sword and sorcery tale that takes you on wild and differing ventures, all to march and band factions to face against the Darkspawn’s Blight in the upcoming final battle. Sure, I could go for a random B-Movie horror montage about the rising dead seeking to overtake Redcliffe Castle and its village, all concocted from a mage tutorship gone awry. You mean to tell me that after that I have to deal with a random cult in a bygone temple to secure an ancient artifact too? Oh please, I can only handle so much excitement! Talking trees and mad hermits inhabiting Brecilian Forest, alongside a werewolf’s curse? What kind of Point And Click game did I stumble onto? All that political intrigue and history lesson Orzammar unfolds and lets you peruse is great and all, but maybe I just wanna go apeshit about connecting dungeons of time lost so lemme see that Deep Roads real quick. I fucking LOVE towers just like Tsutomu Nihei, so thank god I can climb this desolate institute the Mages and Templars occupy, lemme sidestep those creepy demons and their turmoil real quick. I don’t have anything funny to say about the Alienage. It really is that strange of a detour. Got a funny ass interaction though. My tolerance for BIG choices with HUGE consequences has ultimately simmered down to a cool ambivalence, but I’m glad this team had some restraint when it comes to leveling the impact and weight of this angle. There’s not a whole lot of Golden Options or one-sided ways, and the ones that do exist make enough sense to not feel intrusive such as how to resolve the Demon curse in Redcliffe, or finding the middleground for the Dalish/Werewolf feud, or picking Caridin’s side and dropping an ancient anvil because Branka’s a damn psychopath that lost it years before and thinks using it will somehow better the Dwarven society’s already grueling and trepidatious state. It also helps that being an evil bastard here actually fits the setting this time with various ways to do so, finally instilling that sense of roleplay that the studio has always been skewering with alongside all the reactive elements dependent on the Human, Mage, Elf, and Dwarf backgrounds, but admittedly that was a bit of a given. Not every dialog choice has something that will fit entirely with what you want, but there’s enough leeway available to not feel so limiting by comparison too. Couple that with said backgrounds providing insight to the world as much as they can like mentioned before, and even illuminating and strengthening the involvement in a few key areas (again, sans Dalish and City unfortunately), and it was an immediate bet I’d try out so many options in the future. All of this culminating into the Landsmeet, an event monumental in establishing order before the call of the final defense, with niggling ways to influence the outcome and all belaying upon who you are and what you’re about to do.
Bolstering this is far and away my favorite Bioware cast of this era. Suddenly their desire of Whedonisms and outwardly quips are now tied into peeling layers behind some compatriots’ face, or at least utilized in a way that it doesn’t feel as garishly droning as before. Alistair tends to get the brunt of the criticisms regarding this, but considering the dude’s still a fresh-faced recruit who’s still upholding the view of the world always containing clears good/evil, his way of hiding this turmoil behind bad jokes and snarky comebacks are warranted… mostly. He could stand to cut it out a little. Conversing with Zevran and Leliana has always been a delight, the former bearing all of his assassination background for all to know and slowly starting to unveil his reservation regarding where and how he ended up where he is now, and the latter being someone just now finally getting their life figured out after many hardships and a toxic relationship with one they used to call a partner. It’s kind of astounding to me I missed these two out initially cause they’re sort of the answer to something I had wanted Bioware to actually do, that being about writing (as close as they could to) making normal ass people without feeling like a plank of wood about it, and I always make room for them in the party even if I pick the Rogue build myself. Sten’s ideology and conversations are endlessly fascinating to me, his opposition and confrontational attitude giving way to someone to argue and debate over, which immensely helps give him and this worldstate some much needed variety and spice to keep it refreshing. Being able to fully get along with him and be treated in such a way he considers you worthy of respect has consistently been one of the highlights of my play. Wynne’s great in being the tutoring grandma with a magical girl-ass power coinciding with her flaw of letting down someone due to her arrogant youth, Shale’s equally likable for reasons I already touched upon in their accompanying DLC, Morrigan’s someone I want to gush about when I hit the Witch Hunt DLC but I very much consider her one of my all time favorites with an extraordinary look as to how and why she became the way she is now, really the only character I don’t really like all that much is Oghren. I love Steve Blum and Dwarf Jokes as much as the next guy, but he’s kind of a hunk of wood in this respect with a few occasional cool stuff going on. Then there’s Loghain who’s effectively your main antagonist - not villain, that’s the Archdemon - and he’s also someone I’m fascinated by. A heroic and idolized general, so paranoid and distraught over an enemy country potentially allying themself with his home turf and what King Cailin has been attempting to do, that he succumbs to his overemotional outburst, harming both the kingdom and the Grey Wardens solely to drive his desire of vengeance. So many codices and inferences to pick up on, and different states to delve into his psyche, it’s the studio’s biggest throughline into trying out an ambiguous angle, and for the most part it passes all the marks.
It’s a kind of weird feeling to discuss why I enjoy this as much as I do now, cause it bears all the highs and lows of what makes Bioware, well, Bioware. Sure, I’d like it if they cut it out and actually design enemy encounters that aren’t just peekaboo room holdouts and give me a reason as to why I should bother with all my salves and elemental resources, but I can also do this shit to enemies and guide them along my trap-filled layouts so eh. I wish I had more reasons to use the innate skillset that you’d typically find in these fantasy RPGs, but being able to pickpocket so many people with ease is devilishly sickening. They really need to get a handle on their friendly AI patterns, but this being so easy to fine tune and take control of yourself at least means I don't have to suffer the wrath of stupidity like all their other titles I tried out, though they could do with a lesson on "enemy variety" I'm snoozin from all these same types even if that's the intent. I appreciate this being so busted that a synergy involving dual-wielding rogue with specced out Cunning and Dexterity, a dodge-tanking warrior that draws in all the aggro amongst foes, with a mage that does all my support and cast big “FUCK OFF” spell combinations never truly gets old. They could cut it out with the romances but… actually there’s no but. In fairness DAO does is at least the closest it got to maintaining a sense of a gradual kinship and closeness, even if it’s troubling to sell since the options pertaining to this are pretty easy to please and can yet again be maxed way earlier than intended. Overall it’s just an easy game for me to get lost in, despite again, its gangrene state being so blatant that it can understandably harm others’ enjoyment.
A common thread I see amongst all the arcs available is this sensation of something once thought to be lost in the ages, now coming back to us in unexpected, gratuitous, and downright cataclysmic ways. Something that sort of emboldens our hunger for knowledge or for a path to make things right, or at least confide in as we lose ourselves to our internal pain and suffering. Considering that I coincidentally started going through old Bioware titles (and KOTOR2 but that’s not quite as relevant here) around the time they’re finally at the risk of collapsing, along with the fact that I'm now seeing a lot of people call this their "last good game" if not for ME2 which is increasingly growing my cracked (again, all from what I'm seeing, doesn't mean I believe it), maybe that was just the sort of thing I needed a refresher on, a hallmark and reminder on the type of adventure they used to deliver in my youth. Either that or I just wanted another excuse to pour a hundred and so hours into this title I like a lot, considering it's been on my docket since replaying the original Mass Effect trilogy two years ago. Maybe it’s both! It’s probably both. Perhaps more experience of cRPGs could impact what I gain from this but uhhhhhhhhh idc about that it's kinda lame to think so. Doesn't mean I won't neglect my homework though.
Anyway I gotta do something about this strange rock I found... wonder what I can make from it.
====================================================================================
BioWare has always been a place where its employees implant their influences into their releases, Dragon Age Origins being no different. Its setting and worldbuilding blend epic and dark fantasy series like Lord Of The Rings and A Song Of Fire And Ice, with obvious callbacks to their roots of creating the Baldur’s Gate duology several years prior. Thing is, it’s also a title developed in about 7 years, and it shows in an egregious fashion. Drafts of ideas being abound but never coming to fruition, such as other origin points for Humans shot down before they were able to go anywhere, Morrigan being the narrator with an expanded Dark Ritual scenario becoming truncated or excised, Grey Wardens and Darkspawn weren’t elements conceived of at first, fictional languages for different races, with help from Wolf Wikeley once again, having to be tossed aside and altered after not panning out well, chaotic rumblings affecting the production and prototype process amongst other roadblocks like whether or not multiplayer should be implemented, hell originally the dragons part of the title weren’t gonna be a thing, yet they were retrofitted onto the story thanks to a name generator giving them ideas, and Thedas being born as the community forum’s shorthand for, well, THE Dragon Age Setting. This notion and wounded stitch can also be felt within the game: an influence system, forgoing the studio’s rising penchant for morality, has systemic benefits for your bonded partners while intense friction can allow them to leave permanently, but with how easy it is to accrue gifts and approval points, and no equal benefits to outweigh the immense drawbacks, there’s little reason to act as enraged towards them; the Broken Circle arc fundamentally has two dungeons, one you’re actively doing as you climb to the top, and another that appears right before the end enacted by a Sloth Demon’s hypnotic spell, that sprawls and elongates the venture to such a degree that those who replay it - myself included - elect to installing the Skip The Fade mod, reaping all the benefits while downscaling all the story bits to the absolute essentials; the Orzammar Assembly has options to coerce higher ups into swaying on the side of either Bhelen or Harrowmont, yet it’s all for naught since this arc ends with you gifting a crown that cements the new ruling; Brecilian Forest and the Denerim Alienage both have strong prologues to help lay the groundwork of worldbuilding and roleplaying potential, yet their inclusion in regards to the main story reeks of either undercooked ideas with any threads to the Dalish Elf’s encampment snipped and handwaved as “a different group”, or an excuse to help the player and their allies progress the Landsmeet plot while giving the City Elf’s birthplace an involved cog in the machine. Even the Dog you recruit, with its maxed influence, niche talent pools, and ho-hum stat fills that seems to have suffered from aborted experimentation and ideas, affecting the combat balance to such little degree that I used the Extra Dog Slot and Dog Gift Tweaks mods with marginal or no errors having cropped up during my entire session. Those are just the ones I can immediately recall, but there’s several more at the forefront.
Even the worldbuilding aspect comes across as moot, containing little deviations and idiosyncrasies that can carve out the title’s unique identity. The prevailing wound bled from all that time spent trying to get the idea a foundation, and it results in executions of tried-and-true cliches at their most bare, few deviations being done to give itself a mein. For the matriarchal belief and religion that Andraste had inspired, there exists Ferelden’s Chantry sect that is very easily inferred as controlling and seclusionary upon the mages. For the caste-based system and underground dwelling that gives the Dwarves a position to call their own, the Elves’ divide between nature and (sub)urban assimilation begins to sketch its mark yet again. It’s not inaccurate to say that DAO’s fantasy outings are “generic”, but it’s perhaps more accurate to say that it isn’t carved enough for genre enthusiasts to sink their teeth into, such as how the Fade exists and intertwines itself with the living or the near-fatalistic ideology that is shared amongst the Qunari, various DLC add-ons upholding that void instead. Also humanoid presentations are just kinda ugly but at this point I feel like that’s just a small issue. I haven't come across an entirely finished title this blatantly troubled and cobbled together since replaying Wind Waker last year. Thing is, much like that game, I'm willing to overlook past all that because the ADVENTURE is pretty damn sick. Bioware writing during this era had one best aspect coupled by the worst. KOTOR1's pacing is sublime and is likely the easiest to (re)play, but the story is so plattered with corn and cheese it makes some of the more awkward moments in the prequels and other Bioware titles become Shakespearian; Jade Empire has an immensely captivating and intricate world and villain, but it's dragged down by hollowed out moments with uncomplacent companions; Mass Effect 1 has the strongest sense of cohesion and scale, yet its lackluster side material holds it back. DAO, meanwhile, pretty comfortably captures that rampant and scattershot feel a TTRPG session has, especially since I recently dabbled into D&D and Pathfinder campaigns.
Despite all my rabbles and censures, David Gaider and his writing cohorts did a superb job at formulating the usual serial TV pacing into the sword and sorcery tale that takes you on wild and differing ventures, all to march and band factions to face against the Darkspawn’s Blight in the upcoming final battle. Sure, I could go for a random B-Movie horror montage about the rising dead seeking to overtake Redcliffe Castle and its village, all concocted from a mage tutorship gone awry. You mean to tell me that after that I have to deal with a random cult in a bygone temple to secure an ancient artifact too? Oh please, I can only handle so much excitement! Talking trees and mad hermits inhabiting Brecilian Forest, alongside a werewolf’s curse? What kind of Point And Click game did I stumble onto? All that political intrigue and history lesson Orzammar unfolds and lets you peruse is great and all, but maybe I just wanna go apeshit about connecting dungeons of time lost so lemme see that Deep Roads real quick. I fucking LOVE towers just like Tsutomu Nihei, so thank god I can climb this desolate institute the Mages and Templars occupy, lemme sidestep those creepy demons and their turmoil real quick. I don’t have anything funny to say about the Alienage. It really is that strange of a detour. Got a funny ass interaction though. My tolerance for BIG choices with HUGE consequences has ultimately simmered down to a cool ambivalence, but I’m glad this team had some restraint when it comes to leveling the impact and weight of this angle. There’s not a whole lot of Golden Options or one-sided ways, and the ones that do exist make enough sense to not feel intrusive such as how to resolve the Demon curse in Redcliffe, or finding the middleground for the Dalish/Werewolf feud, or picking Caridin’s side and dropping an ancient anvil because Branka’s a damn psychopath that lost it years before and thinks using it will somehow better the Dwarven society’s already grueling and trepidatious state. It also helps that being an evil bastard here actually fits the setting this time with various ways to do so, finally instilling that sense of roleplay that the studio has always been skewering with alongside all the reactive elements dependent on the Human, Mage, Elf, and Dwarf backgrounds, but admittedly that was a bit of a given. Not every dialog choice has something that will fit entirely with what you want, but there’s enough leeway available to not feel so limiting by comparison too. Couple that with said backgrounds providing insight to the world as much as they can like mentioned before, and even illuminating and strengthening the involvement in a few key areas (again, sans Dalish and City unfortunately), and it was an immediate bet I’d try out so many options in the future. All of this culminating into the Landsmeet, an event monumental in establishing order before the call of the final defense, with niggling ways to influence the outcome and all belaying upon who you are and what you’re about to do.
Bolstering this is far and away my favorite Bioware cast of this era. Suddenly their desire of Whedonisms and outwardly quips are now tied into peeling layers behind some compatriots’ face, or at least utilized in a way that it doesn’t feel as garishly droning as before. Alistair tends to get the brunt of the criticisms regarding this, but considering the dude’s still a fresh-faced recruit who’s still upholding the view of the world always containing clears good/evil, his way of hiding this turmoil behind bad jokes and snarky comebacks are warranted… mostly. He could stand to cut it out a little. Conversing with Zevran and Leliana has always been a delight, the former bearing all of his assassination background for all to know and slowly starting to unveil his reservation regarding where and how he ended up where he is now, and the latter being someone just now finally getting their life figured out after many hardships and a toxic relationship with one they used to call a partner. It’s kind of astounding to me I missed these two out initially cause they’re sort of the answer to something I had wanted Bioware to actually do, that being about writing (as close as they could to) making normal ass people without feeling like a plank of wood about it, and I always make room for them in the party even if I pick the Rogue build myself. Sten’s ideology and conversations are endlessly fascinating to me, his opposition and confrontational attitude giving way to someone to argue and debate over, which immensely helps give him and this worldstate some much needed variety and spice to keep it refreshing. Being able to fully get along with him and be treated in such a way he considers you worthy of respect has consistently been one of the highlights of my play. Wynne’s great in being the tutoring grandma with a magical girl-ass power coinciding with her flaw of letting down someone due to her arrogant youth, Shale’s equally likable for reasons I already touched upon in their accompanying DLC, Morrigan’s someone I want to gush about when I hit the Witch Hunt DLC but I very much consider her one of my all time favorites with an extraordinary look as to how and why she became the way she is now, really the only character I don’t really like all that much is Oghren. I love Steve Blum and Dwarf Jokes as much as the next guy, but he’s kind of a hunk of wood in this respect with a few occasional cool stuff going on. Then there’s Loghain who’s effectively your main antagonist - not villain, that’s the Archdemon - and he’s also someone I’m fascinated by. A heroic and idolized general, so paranoid and distraught over an enemy country potentially allying themself with his home turf and what King Cailin has been attempting to do, that he succumbs to his overemotional outburst, harming both the kingdom and the Grey Wardens solely to drive his desire of vengeance. So many codices and inferences to pick up on, and different states to delve into his psyche, it’s the studio’s biggest throughline into trying out an ambiguous angle, and for the most part it passes all the marks.
It’s a kind of weird feeling to discuss why I enjoy this as much as I do now, cause it bears all the highs and lows of what makes Bioware, well, Bioware. Sure, I’d like it if they cut it out and actually design enemy encounters that aren’t just peekaboo room holdouts and give me a reason as to why I should bother with all my salves and elemental resources, but I can also do this shit to enemies and guide them along my trap-filled layouts so eh. I wish I had more reasons to use the innate skillset that you’d typically find in these fantasy RPGs, but being able to pickpocket so many people with ease is devilishly sickening. They really need to get a handle on their friendly AI patterns, but this being so easy to fine tune and take control of yourself at least means I don't have to suffer the wrath of stupidity like all their other titles I tried out, though they could do with a lesson on "enemy variety" I'm snoozin from all these same types even if that's the intent. I appreciate this being so busted that a synergy involving dual-wielding rogue with specced out Cunning and Dexterity, a dodge-tanking warrior that draws in all the aggro amongst foes, with a mage that does all my support and cast big “FUCK OFF” spell combinations never truly gets old. They could cut it out with the romances but… actually there’s no but. In fairness DAO does is at least the closest it got to maintaining a sense of a gradual kinship and closeness, even if it’s troubling to sell since the options pertaining to this are pretty easy to please and can yet again be maxed way earlier than intended. Overall it’s just an easy game for me to get lost in, despite again, its gangrene state being so blatant that it can understandably harm others’ enjoyment.
A common thread I see amongst all the arcs available is this sensation of something once thought to be lost in the ages, now coming back to us in unexpected, gratuitous, and downright cataclysmic ways. Something that sort of emboldens our hunger for knowledge or for a path to make things right, or at least confide in as we lose ourselves to our internal pain and suffering. Considering that I coincidentally started going through old Bioware titles (and KOTOR2 but that’s not quite as relevant here) around the time they’re finally at the risk of collapsing, along with the fact that I'm now seeing a lot of people call this their "last good game" if not for ME2 which is increasingly growing my cracked (again, all from what I'm seeing, doesn't mean I believe it), maybe that was just the sort of thing I needed a refresher on, a hallmark and reminder on the type of adventure they used to deliver in my youth. Either that or I just wanted another excuse to pour a hundred and so hours into this title I like a lot, considering it's been on my docket since replaying the original Mass Effect trilogy two years ago. Maybe it’s both! It’s probably both. Perhaps more experience of cRPGs could impact what I gain from this but uhhhhhhhhh idc about that it's kinda lame to think so. Doesn't mean I won't neglect my homework though.
Anyway I gotta do something about this strange rock I found... wonder what I can make from it.
Burnout 3: Takedown
2004
The prior seconds pass with the enormity of centuries. Scattershot shrapnel peppers the asphalt, signaling the arrival of two street demons, both careening through air in a ludicrous display of car-nal car-nage. Like detached limbs, their wheels flail freely, in defiance of death itself, rolling to an uneventful stop against the guardrail. Launched beyond the rail’s comforting bounds, misfortuned motorists find their engines extinguished, their windshields splintered and scattered haphazardly. For what it’s worth, it's a spectacle with little to show for it; the same crumpled wreckages find themselves sprinting down the stretch once again, leaving little but metal and skid marks. Coming to my senses, parallel with the rail, I’m lightheaded and weak.
My ribs are a fine powder, my liver a congealed mass, my brain pulsing red-light, green-light pain and shock overdoses… but my machine roars to life. A gentle nudge of the accelerator eases her back on the straight-ahead, but an injection of noxious nitrous oxide pumps searing adrenaline through her veins – With a banshee’s scream, she climbs to 100, 120, 150, 200 miles per hour. The prying eyes piercing into the roll cage soon burn into spectral light, their lesser vehicles little more than dust against my almighty steed. Lost in the cacophony of merciless thieves, I give chase to secure what’s rightfully mine – The dizzying height, the brightest shine, the golden flow of first place. But my rivals, backstabbers and bastards all, seem poised to pilfer perfection from me once again.
It’s a trio ahead – The former deceased pair, and an impervious highway star leading the pack. In an endless stretch, it’d be a massacre, but with less than two miles left, the nerves start wearing me down. First is the rookie mistakes – a drift too harsh here, a grind against the median there, hell, even a full-scale collision to spice things up, but all too soon I’m peering down invisible crosshairs at the weakest link. Everything happens fast as I shotgun a final blast of nitro into a purring motor, my chariot a battering ram; the lesser of the twins crumples underfoot, ripped in two as hopeless fourth bashes into the corpse. The wiser twin falls just as simply; grinding against my steel chassis, they neglected to peek the eighteen-wheeler hurtling headlong. I can barely make out a resentful curse from the driver’s seat as the million-dollar machine is mulched.
And then, it was you, me, and the finish line. And brother, I wish our tale ended oh so simply, but either through fate or karma, neither of us were to receive fated first that day. It was as it always goes, in the United States, across Europe, to the far off shores of Asia – Even at our best, neither of us expected a humble family of four to be our downfall. You crashed into the van, as expected, but as if touched by a vengeful spirited, your shell bashed into me, and I into the monorail over yonder. Seeing this moment of weakness, hopeless fourth charges, pointless fifth overtakes, and… impossible sixth takes home the gold – My gold.
Still, I can’t help but laugh. Over a hundred gold metals, and I’m still caught off-guard, still left to ponder what-ifs and what-abouts. Pulling a swift 180, I curve my car along the backroad, glancing at the glistening lights in the rearview. With a smile, I hit boost once again… Launching myself directly into the busy highway, where a city bus embraces me at 90 miles per hour.
I wake, still slumped along the guardrail. The dual gods of speed soar overhead, colliding with the gathering crowd. With a flick, I boost back into the race. For one last time, let’s go for gold.
My ribs are a fine powder, my liver a congealed mass, my brain pulsing red-light, green-light pain and shock overdoses… but my machine roars to life. A gentle nudge of the accelerator eases her back on the straight-ahead, but an injection of noxious nitrous oxide pumps searing adrenaline through her veins – With a banshee’s scream, she climbs to 100, 120, 150, 200 miles per hour. The prying eyes piercing into the roll cage soon burn into spectral light, their lesser vehicles little more than dust against my almighty steed. Lost in the cacophony of merciless thieves, I give chase to secure what’s rightfully mine – The dizzying height, the brightest shine, the golden flow of first place. But my rivals, backstabbers and bastards all, seem poised to pilfer perfection from me once again.
It’s a trio ahead – The former deceased pair, and an impervious highway star leading the pack. In an endless stretch, it’d be a massacre, but with less than two miles left, the nerves start wearing me down. First is the rookie mistakes – a drift too harsh here, a grind against the median there, hell, even a full-scale collision to spice things up, but all too soon I’m peering down invisible crosshairs at the weakest link. Everything happens fast as I shotgun a final blast of nitro into a purring motor, my chariot a battering ram; the lesser of the twins crumples underfoot, ripped in two as hopeless fourth bashes into the corpse. The wiser twin falls just as simply; grinding against my steel chassis, they neglected to peek the eighteen-wheeler hurtling headlong. I can barely make out a resentful curse from the driver’s seat as the million-dollar machine is mulched.
And then, it was you, me, and the finish line. And brother, I wish our tale ended oh so simply, but either through fate or karma, neither of us were to receive fated first that day. It was as it always goes, in the United States, across Europe, to the far off shores of Asia – Even at our best, neither of us expected a humble family of four to be our downfall. You crashed into the van, as expected, but as if touched by a vengeful spirited, your shell bashed into me, and I into the monorail over yonder. Seeing this moment of weakness, hopeless fourth charges, pointless fifth overtakes, and… impossible sixth takes home the gold – My gold.
Still, I can’t help but laugh. Over a hundred gold metals, and I’m still caught off-guard, still left to ponder what-ifs and what-abouts. Pulling a swift 180, I curve my car along the backroad, glancing at the glistening lights in the rearview. With a smile, I hit boost once again… Launching myself directly into the busy highway, where a city bus embraces me at 90 miles per hour.
I wake, still slumped along the guardrail. The dual gods of speed soar overhead, colliding with the gathering crowd. With a flick, I boost back into the race. For one last time, let’s go for gold.
Vixen 357
1992
An elaboration of Masaya's Assault Suit Leynos via thesis: Mid-crisis mech military cinemacy, now taken form as a Strategy RPG. Depth starts somewhat shallow, slowly matures into a highly-intricate behemoth, then fails to stick the landing with a borderline game-killing victory lap.
As a mech tactics game, your squad (and the opponent's) are outfitted with extremely long-range options right out the gate, with little inhibitions. In most other SRPG's, this would create a severe imbalance, so Vixen compromises by making all units extremely tanky - most enemies take 8 shots to go down, and your own team can burden anywhere from 10 to 30 depending on the scenario. Taking out enemies effectively is a matter of dogpiling on them one at a time in a grand war of attrition. But within a couple missions, your squad is joined by reliable ol' Ben and his aerial battleship. Ben's range is even more absurd than your ground squad's, his movement's unaffected by terrain rules, and his health is monstrous. But most important: He can carry your own units and let them refuel/heal. This starts a spiral of balancing aggressive play while keeping Ben in range to stock up on healing opportunities, like a portable home base - a huddle-like system that expands further when Chay & Nina join with their shield-generating Panacea. It's also worth noting pilots and mechs are selected independently from the disembarking menu. This opens up a huge swathe of technical options: Mixing pilots into mechs that comfortably match their stats, sending pilots out in bad stat matchups as a means to grind EXP, but most importantly, returning a mech to the battleship and tagging in another pilot with it so you can double-attack. When the game gives you proximity missles around the second half, pulling this tandem move is a risky but game-changing maneuver. Vixen is fantastic at taking these simple-but-deep mechanics and slowly introducing new vectors of challenge for you to overcome with them.
That is, until the last few missions - the back five against the big bad and his quartet of right-hands are all noticeably difficult, but mission 14 is a signal of infamy. It's a surprise attack mission - and the enemy does the surprise attacking. Not only do they outnumber you and get full coverage of the map when they appear, but their ambush happens on their turn, meaning they're guaranteed a better start. This mission is borderline impossible - if you give the team even one weak unit to gang up on, they will. I would've finished this game a month or so ago, but this single mission pushed me away from it for so long, and I only beat it today by save-scumming through - constantly checking the enemy AI for which unit they were going to target, treating the load/save toggle like a simulation of guerilla horrors until I figured out a perfect plan of action.
What's more demoralizing though is how the game totally drops the ball after that; the last mission isn't even somewhat hard, just a slog. The final boss holes himself up in a corner of the room, using MP to throw screen nukes and full heals around willy-nilly. Take about 25 turns of shooting him and he'll eventually run out of ammo. I nearly shit myself when you beat him and they fake you into thinking he has a second phase, I was close to losing it.
Had this game ended better, it could be one of my new favorite Genesis games. In its current state though, it's not super recommendable, and even though I'd love to play it again, I'd probably stop once things get hairy. A shame; it deserves to be seen as one of many other SPRG classics on Genesis, up there with Lord Monarch and Shining Force.
Super Fighter Team got close to a commercial translation of this a while ago, but it got cancelled out of the blue. Masaya's been working with Ratalaika a lot since then; I'd love a port to modern platforms with some difficulty tweaks and emulation furnishing, just like their Gleylancer port.
As a mech tactics game, your squad (and the opponent's) are outfitted with extremely long-range options right out the gate, with little inhibitions. In most other SRPG's, this would create a severe imbalance, so Vixen compromises by making all units extremely tanky - most enemies take 8 shots to go down, and your own team can burden anywhere from 10 to 30 depending on the scenario. Taking out enemies effectively is a matter of dogpiling on them one at a time in a grand war of attrition. But within a couple missions, your squad is joined by reliable ol' Ben and his aerial battleship. Ben's range is even more absurd than your ground squad's, his movement's unaffected by terrain rules, and his health is monstrous. But most important: He can carry your own units and let them refuel/heal. This starts a spiral of balancing aggressive play while keeping Ben in range to stock up on healing opportunities, like a portable home base - a huddle-like system that expands further when Chay & Nina join with their shield-generating Panacea. It's also worth noting pilots and mechs are selected independently from the disembarking menu. This opens up a huge swathe of technical options: Mixing pilots into mechs that comfortably match their stats, sending pilots out in bad stat matchups as a means to grind EXP, but most importantly, returning a mech to the battleship and tagging in another pilot with it so you can double-attack. When the game gives you proximity missles around the second half, pulling this tandem move is a risky but game-changing maneuver. Vixen is fantastic at taking these simple-but-deep mechanics and slowly introducing new vectors of challenge for you to overcome with them.
That is, until the last few missions - the back five against the big bad and his quartet of right-hands are all noticeably difficult, but mission 14 is a signal of infamy. It's a surprise attack mission - and the enemy does the surprise attacking. Not only do they outnumber you and get full coverage of the map when they appear, but their ambush happens on their turn, meaning they're guaranteed a better start. This mission is borderline impossible - if you give the team even one weak unit to gang up on, they will. I would've finished this game a month or so ago, but this single mission pushed me away from it for so long, and I only beat it today by save-scumming through - constantly checking the enemy AI for which unit they were going to target, treating the load/save toggle like a simulation of guerilla horrors until I figured out a perfect plan of action.
What's more demoralizing though is how the game totally drops the ball after that; the last mission isn't even somewhat hard, just a slog. The final boss holes himself up in a corner of the room, using MP to throw screen nukes and full heals around willy-nilly. Take about 25 turns of shooting him and he'll eventually run out of ammo. I nearly shit myself when you beat him and they fake you into thinking he has a second phase, I was close to losing it.
Had this game ended better, it could be one of my new favorite Genesis games. In its current state though, it's not super recommendable, and even though I'd love to play it again, I'd probably stop once things get hairy. A shame; it deserves to be seen as one of many other SPRG classics on Genesis, up there with Lord Monarch and Shining Force.
Super Fighter Team got close to a commercial translation of this a while ago, but it got cancelled out of the blue. Masaya's been working with Ratalaika a lot since then; I'd love a port to modern platforms with some difficulty tweaks and emulation furnishing, just like their Gleylancer port.
Frisson rendered concrete.
The impending release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic has sent a prevailing wind of ennui through my being. A little over a year ago I deleted my Battle.net account. Activision Blizzard's handling of the Blitzchung situation, the news breaking of their abuses towards employees, the disaster that was Warcraft III Reforged, the patronising announcement of Diablo Immortal, Heroes of the Storm entering maintenance mode, the unmitigated mess that was Battle for Azeroth, the notion of an Overwatch 2, the ballooning of the WoW cash shop, the insistence on annual subscriptions, the time gating of content, the borrowed power systems, the lore trash fire of Shadowlands, and the ostentatious claim of Eternity's End being the 'Final Chapter' of a supposed Warcraft 3 saga, in an attempt to combat Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker's Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga all broke the proverbial camel's back. This was not a spontaneous act. This was a deliberate decision on my part to fundamentally erase the record of my participation in a game I spent over half my life with. I've permanently denied myself the possibility of returning to something I loved with my entire being. Wrath of the Lich King Classic theoretically extends a hand from the beyond to welcome me home, but despite what Blizzard might propose, I can never go back. No one can ever go back.
It is this memory of Arthas that I choose to keep in my heart.
Others learned of the unlivability of a reborn nostalgia with World of Warcraft Classic and Burning Crusade Classic, but that original game and its expansion were before my time. They were antiquated in comparison to Wrath of the Lich King. Wrath of the Lich King was a direct continuation of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, rather than just a tale within that realm. This wasn't some hodgepodge of rote item collection to counter minor threats, or the battling of foes so literally alien as to be largely irrelevant to me and my character. This was a considered effort to contend with the horrors of the past, an opportunity to feel like an active participant in an era-defining event.
Wait... I remember you... in the mountains.
The issue of reviving these past experiences is that their original forms were borne into a more naive time. Old School Runescape demonstrated before World of Warcraft Classic the ills of older MMO design in a hyper-online world. Whereas our playing of Runescape in 2007 was informed by rumours and assumptions of what was and could be possible, 2007scape exists in a world where every iota of information is readily documented. 2013 and 2022 are not the time of Zezima, of Unregistered HyperCam 2, of proto-Machinimas, of frag videos, of fishing for lobbies in Catherby for hours, of playing the game for the fun of itself rather than to 'succeed'. What Old School Runescape taught us a decade ago was that, as Sid Meier put it, "Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." I am not so oblivious as to claim people had not already done this in Runescape, but without the omnipresence of YouTube open-mouth thumbnails and Reddit megathreads, your average player probably wasn't min-maxing then as they would now. Old School Runescape is perhaps the most perfect representation of efficiency being the game itself, like Factorio if it were a fantasy MMORPG. It has become an antisocial MMO experience, because socialising is itself inefficient. And yet, World of Warcraft Classic came out only to suffer the exact same problems.
A hero, that's what you once were.
The core issue with recuscitating the original World of Warcraft experience is, I think, one of iteration rather than of inversion. Players clamored for a return to 2007 Runescape because the game had fundamentally changed in no small part because of Summoning and the Evolution of Combat update. It was no longer the point and click, set and forget MMO of yesteryear, but an involved, cooldown based, hotbar experience. World of Warcraft on the other hand has always been basically the same game, improving (mostly) with each patch and expansion, iterating on that foundation. To be sure, the WoW of 2019 was radically different from its 15 years gone forebear, but it wasn't a completely different package sold as something else. Reduced to its base elements, both versions of the game are the same. A different flavour of chocolate, but chocolate all the same. What made the 'Classic' experience so great when remembered was that WoW was novel for so many. The notion of a massive world you could explore with others, all interconnected with no loading screens (outside of instances/teleporting), with forty player raids, with an air of discoverability was specific to the time period. Thottbot existed, but not everyone needed (or felt they needed) to use it, and its data was primarily anecdotal rather than informed by hard statistics. With fifteen years of info at our fingertips, the Classic experience quite literally can't be reproduced, just as the Runescape of 2007 remains firmly in historic memory.
This is the hour of their ascension. This is the hour of your dark rebirth...
With the fun optimised out of World of Warcraft, and without substantive novel content outside of forty player raiding and untouched questing, the playerbase rather quickly turned apathetic towards Classic. It did not, and could not, live up to that memory, and it left Blizzard in a tricky position. Without updates, Classic had little to keep players invested. With Old School Runescape style updates, it would not be the World of Warcraft of yore. The solution, it seems, was to have a divergent path. World of Warcraft Classic would persist, with players having the option to continue to Burning Crusade Classic. This is well and good on the surface, but it was soured by the Digital Deluxe edition's inclusion of a character boost, in-game cosmetic items, and a new mount. Even ignoring the addition of items which didn't exist in the original release, the character boost alone betrayed the supposed ethos of the Classic experience. As a means of preventing players from missing out on that initial rush of the expansion's release, a boost isn't intrinsically a bad thing, but it being locked behind a paywall made the playing field uneven. This was no longer about reliving bygone days, this was about a fear of missing out, this was a chance to rush to the destination, rather than revel in the journey itself.
I will treasure it always - a moment of time that will be lost forever.
The same thing is going to occur with Wrath of the Lich King Classic. I was only 11 when I started playing WoW. Ulduar had just been added to the game. I couldn't have cared less about optimisation. I made numerous characters and ambled around aimlessly. I played comically poorly. I drew my characters on looseleaf. I was so excited and enthralled by this world which stretched before me. Eventually settling on a Tauren Hunter, every moment of the game was precious. As a child, it was a formative experience. I can still remember struggling with the quest Mazzranache, entering the Barrens for the first time, seeing gold sellers float auspiciously in Orgrimmar, killing dinosaurs in Un'Goro Crater, wondering where all the quests were in Silithus. Outlands never grabbed me quite the same way perhaps because of its contrast with Azeroth itself, with its inhabitants whose problems were literally a world away. When I reached the prerequisite level, I created a Death Knight. The random name generator bestowed upon me a moniker I still use to this day, Chuulimta. The starting zone genuinely shook me, at once appealing to my prepubescent desire to commit virtual atrocities while making it crystal clear that these horrors exacerbated the problems of the realm. I was hindering the world I wished to save. And when I eventually stepped on the zeppelin bound for the Howling Fjord, and gazed upon those verdant cliffs, I was agog at the quiet beauty of it all.
For you, I would give my life a thousand times.
I was actively helping an effort to rid the world of an unspeakable terror. And yet, I was also able to find moments of levity and calm. It's almost laughable in retrospect, to think I was having an appreciable effect on anything in this virtual landscape at the peak of WoW's popularity, but it felt and feels real after all this time. Even imagining the nyckelharpa of the Grizzly Hills theme, or those claustrophobic peaks in The Storm Peaks, or the amber grasses of Borean Tundra, or the bustle of Dalaran, those recollections rend my heart in twain. This frigid land clinging to life in the face of decay was home. At a time of change for me and my family, Northrend was my constant.
Do with it as you please, but do not forget those that assisted you in this monumental feat.
At a time of friendlessness, Wrath of the Lich King afforded me social opportunities, however fragmentary, that kept me moving forward. Names flitter away from my grasp, their recall an impossibility by now. The familiar faces when I would fish, those smile-inducing comrades who would greet me when I logged in, those scant few who would run content with me for no gain outside of the pleasure of the act itself. They will never return to me, nor I to them. And that atmosphere will not for anyone. The compartmentalising of social gaming into Discord servers and group chats forbids that earnest connection with the unfamiliar other outright. Just as in Old School Runescape, the game might be massively multiplayer, but it has become more solitary than ever.
Leave me. I have much to ponder.
I didn't kill the Lich King until much later, around Mists of Pandaria. I had seen so much of Icecrown Citadel, completing every fight up to the Lich King, but its mechanics were beyond me until I vastly outleveled, and outgeared it. Even with a statistical advantage, I wasn't able to do it alone. I brought along a friend who had just been getting into WoW. For him it was the first time starting ICC, for me it was the first time bringing the tale of Arthas to a close. When Arthas was felled and that iconic cutscene played, I was moved to tears. I had closed the loop on such an important part of my life. From then on, I would and could only have the memory, for there was naught left for me to find.
Alas... you give me a greater gift than you know.
Each expansion of World of Warcraft sees the outgoing content largely deprecated and abandoned. This only compounds, making it all the less likely you will encounter someone in an old expansion as time shambles on. Like revisiting your childhood home, this makes going back to see what once was gut wrenching. It was such a simple time, one of joy. It was an experience that can never be relived, by me or by anyone.
At last, I am able to lay my eyes upon you again.
Shortly before I logged out of World of Warcraft for what would, unbeknownst to me, be the last time, I flew across Northrend, descending into Wintergrasp to take in one of my favourite pieces of music. Crested on a snowy mound, an unfamiliar face landed beside me silently, and offered to me one word.
"Hey."
That was, and always will be, enough.
The impending release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic has sent a prevailing wind of ennui through my being. A little over a year ago I deleted my Battle.net account. Activision Blizzard's handling of the Blitzchung situation, the news breaking of their abuses towards employees, the disaster that was Warcraft III Reforged, the patronising announcement of Diablo Immortal, Heroes of the Storm entering maintenance mode, the unmitigated mess that was Battle for Azeroth, the notion of an Overwatch 2, the ballooning of the WoW cash shop, the insistence on annual subscriptions, the time gating of content, the borrowed power systems, the lore trash fire of Shadowlands, and the ostentatious claim of Eternity's End being the 'Final Chapter' of a supposed Warcraft 3 saga, in an attempt to combat Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker's Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga all broke the proverbial camel's back. This was not a spontaneous act. This was a deliberate decision on my part to fundamentally erase the record of my participation in a game I spent over half my life with. I've permanently denied myself the possibility of returning to something I loved with my entire being. Wrath of the Lich King Classic theoretically extends a hand from the beyond to welcome me home, but despite what Blizzard might propose, I can never go back. No one can ever go back.
It is this memory of Arthas that I choose to keep in my heart.
Others learned of the unlivability of a reborn nostalgia with World of Warcraft Classic and Burning Crusade Classic, but that original game and its expansion were before my time. They were antiquated in comparison to Wrath of the Lich King. Wrath of the Lich King was a direct continuation of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, rather than just a tale within that realm. This wasn't some hodgepodge of rote item collection to counter minor threats, or the battling of foes so literally alien as to be largely irrelevant to me and my character. This was a considered effort to contend with the horrors of the past, an opportunity to feel like an active participant in an era-defining event.
Wait... I remember you... in the mountains.
The issue of reviving these past experiences is that their original forms were borne into a more naive time. Old School Runescape demonstrated before World of Warcraft Classic the ills of older MMO design in a hyper-online world. Whereas our playing of Runescape in 2007 was informed by rumours and assumptions of what was and could be possible, 2007scape exists in a world where every iota of information is readily documented. 2013 and 2022 are not the time of Zezima, of Unregistered HyperCam 2, of proto-Machinimas, of frag videos, of fishing for lobbies in Catherby for hours, of playing the game for the fun of itself rather than to 'succeed'. What Old School Runescape taught us a decade ago was that, as Sid Meier put it, "Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." I am not so oblivious as to claim people had not already done this in Runescape, but without the omnipresence of YouTube open-mouth thumbnails and Reddit megathreads, your average player probably wasn't min-maxing then as they would now. Old School Runescape is perhaps the most perfect representation of efficiency being the game itself, like Factorio if it were a fantasy MMORPG. It has become an antisocial MMO experience, because socialising is itself inefficient. And yet, World of Warcraft Classic came out only to suffer the exact same problems.
A hero, that's what you once were.
The core issue with recuscitating the original World of Warcraft experience is, I think, one of iteration rather than of inversion. Players clamored for a return to 2007 Runescape because the game had fundamentally changed in no small part because of Summoning and the Evolution of Combat update. It was no longer the point and click, set and forget MMO of yesteryear, but an involved, cooldown based, hotbar experience. World of Warcraft on the other hand has always been basically the same game, improving (mostly) with each patch and expansion, iterating on that foundation. To be sure, the WoW of 2019 was radically different from its 15 years gone forebear, but it wasn't a completely different package sold as something else. Reduced to its base elements, both versions of the game are the same. A different flavour of chocolate, but chocolate all the same. What made the 'Classic' experience so great when remembered was that WoW was novel for so many. The notion of a massive world you could explore with others, all interconnected with no loading screens (outside of instances/teleporting), with forty player raids, with an air of discoverability was specific to the time period. Thottbot existed, but not everyone needed (or felt they needed) to use it, and its data was primarily anecdotal rather than informed by hard statistics. With fifteen years of info at our fingertips, the Classic experience quite literally can't be reproduced, just as the Runescape of 2007 remains firmly in historic memory.
This is the hour of their ascension. This is the hour of your dark rebirth...
With the fun optimised out of World of Warcraft, and without substantive novel content outside of forty player raiding and untouched questing, the playerbase rather quickly turned apathetic towards Classic. It did not, and could not, live up to that memory, and it left Blizzard in a tricky position. Without updates, Classic had little to keep players invested. With Old School Runescape style updates, it would not be the World of Warcraft of yore. The solution, it seems, was to have a divergent path. World of Warcraft Classic would persist, with players having the option to continue to Burning Crusade Classic. This is well and good on the surface, but it was soured by the Digital Deluxe edition's inclusion of a character boost, in-game cosmetic items, and a new mount. Even ignoring the addition of items which didn't exist in the original release, the character boost alone betrayed the supposed ethos of the Classic experience. As a means of preventing players from missing out on that initial rush of the expansion's release, a boost isn't intrinsically a bad thing, but it being locked behind a paywall made the playing field uneven. This was no longer about reliving bygone days, this was about a fear of missing out, this was a chance to rush to the destination, rather than revel in the journey itself.
I will treasure it always - a moment of time that will be lost forever.
The same thing is going to occur with Wrath of the Lich King Classic. I was only 11 when I started playing WoW. Ulduar had just been added to the game. I couldn't have cared less about optimisation. I made numerous characters and ambled around aimlessly. I played comically poorly. I drew my characters on looseleaf. I was so excited and enthralled by this world which stretched before me. Eventually settling on a Tauren Hunter, every moment of the game was precious. As a child, it was a formative experience. I can still remember struggling with the quest Mazzranache, entering the Barrens for the first time, seeing gold sellers float auspiciously in Orgrimmar, killing dinosaurs in Un'Goro Crater, wondering where all the quests were in Silithus. Outlands never grabbed me quite the same way perhaps because of its contrast with Azeroth itself, with its inhabitants whose problems were literally a world away. When I reached the prerequisite level, I created a Death Knight. The random name generator bestowed upon me a moniker I still use to this day, Chuulimta. The starting zone genuinely shook me, at once appealing to my prepubescent desire to commit virtual atrocities while making it crystal clear that these horrors exacerbated the problems of the realm. I was hindering the world I wished to save. And when I eventually stepped on the zeppelin bound for the Howling Fjord, and gazed upon those verdant cliffs, I was agog at the quiet beauty of it all.
For you, I would give my life a thousand times.
I was actively helping an effort to rid the world of an unspeakable terror. And yet, I was also able to find moments of levity and calm. It's almost laughable in retrospect, to think I was having an appreciable effect on anything in this virtual landscape at the peak of WoW's popularity, but it felt and feels real after all this time. Even imagining the nyckelharpa of the Grizzly Hills theme, or those claustrophobic peaks in The Storm Peaks, or the amber grasses of Borean Tundra, or the bustle of Dalaran, those recollections rend my heart in twain. This frigid land clinging to life in the face of decay was home. At a time of change for me and my family, Northrend was my constant.
Do with it as you please, but do not forget those that assisted you in this monumental feat.
At a time of friendlessness, Wrath of the Lich King afforded me social opportunities, however fragmentary, that kept me moving forward. Names flitter away from my grasp, their recall an impossibility by now. The familiar faces when I would fish, those smile-inducing comrades who would greet me when I logged in, those scant few who would run content with me for no gain outside of the pleasure of the act itself. They will never return to me, nor I to them. And that atmosphere will not for anyone. The compartmentalising of social gaming into Discord servers and group chats forbids that earnest connection with the unfamiliar other outright. Just as in Old School Runescape, the game might be massively multiplayer, but it has become more solitary than ever.
Leave me. I have much to ponder.
I didn't kill the Lich King until much later, around Mists of Pandaria. I had seen so much of Icecrown Citadel, completing every fight up to the Lich King, but its mechanics were beyond me until I vastly outleveled, and outgeared it. Even with a statistical advantage, I wasn't able to do it alone. I brought along a friend who had just been getting into WoW. For him it was the first time starting ICC, for me it was the first time bringing the tale of Arthas to a close. When Arthas was felled and that iconic cutscene played, I was moved to tears. I had closed the loop on such an important part of my life. From then on, I would and could only have the memory, for there was naught left for me to find.
Alas... you give me a greater gift than you know.
Each expansion of World of Warcraft sees the outgoing content largely deprecated and abandoned. This only compounds, making it all the less likely you will encounter someone in an old expansion as time shambles on. Like revisiting your childhood home, this makes going back to see what once was gut wrenching. It was such a simple time, one of joy. It was an experience that can never be relived, by me or by anyone.
At last, I am able to lay my eyes upon you again.
Shortly before I logged out of World of Warcraft for what would, unbeknownst to me, be the last time, I flew across Northrend, descending into Wintergrasp to take in one of my favourite pieces of music. Crested on a snowy mound, an unfamiliar face landed beside me silently, and offered to me one word.
"Hey."
That was, and always will be, enough.
Amnesia: The Bunker
2023
Spooktober 2023
3. Amnesia: The Bunker
“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
And also there was a big monster
and I had to use the physics engine to throw bricks at wooden doors or blow them up with grenades. It’s sort of an immersive sim but also has somewhat linear Resident Evil style progression.
They should make the next game go even harder with that.
There were also some big annoying rodents of unusual size whose AI were unpredictable, making every interaction with them annoying.
It started extremely strong but petered off a tad at the end.
Like I said about Condemned, I am diegetic elements’ strongest soldier. Loading bullets one by one and counting them, pouring gasoline, picking up bricks, hand-cranking. My jam.
Anyway World War I was not a good time.
Dulce de Leche”
-Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est (no additions by me at all, RIP Wilf you would have hated Amnesia: the Bunker)
Edit: sorry everybody. going on indefinite hiatus, need a mental health break.
3. Amnesia: The Bunker
“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
And also there was a big monster
and I had to use the physics engine to throw bricks at wooden doors or blow them up with grenades. It’s sort of an immersive sim but also has somewhat linear Resident Evil style progression.
They should make the next game go even harder with that.
There were also some big annoying rodents of unusual size whose AI were unpredictable, making every interaction with them annoying.
It started extremely strong but petered off a tad at the end.
Like I said about Condemned, I am diegetic elements’ strongest soldier. Loading bullets one by one and counting them, pouring gasoline, picking up bricks, hand-cranking. My jam.
Anyway World War I was not a good time.
Dulce de Leche”
-Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est (no additions by me at all, RIP Wilf you would have hated Amnesia: the Bunker)
Edit: sorry everybody. going on indefinite hiatus, need a mental health break.
Chants of Sennaar
2023
Context is everything.
Without its layer of fictitious languages, Chants of Sennaar would just be another traditional point-and-click adventure game: talk to NPCs, collect and utilize items to solve inventory puzzles, and explore varied landscapes to discover secrets. Yet, that added layer is all Chants of Sennaar needs to stand out, because it fundamentally understands that the act of learning is in itself a puzzle. None of the classic adventure game puzzles are actually that difficult, but conjoined with the underlying problem of deciphering the presented languages at the same time, worldly interactions feel much more engaging and cohesive in the grand scope as learning opportunities, constantly giving you chances to piece together bits of understanding throughout the journey as part of its world-building. It's a fairly simple framework that allows the developers to easily throw new curveballs by simply altering the context to adapt to new surroundings; the underlying objective (learning a new language) never changes, but how other characters/objects interact with the environment around them will differ, so the path to achieve mastery of a new language never feels exactly the same.
It's easy to fault Chants of Sennaar for its limitations. For example, there's only about thirty characters used in each language, and they're all conveniently referring to the same nouns and verbs. However, I'm more than willing to overlook these contrivances, because none of them actually detracted from the game's constructed reality: after all, the game always felt more about the process of learning new languages than the robustness of the languages themselves. Even so, I find that it strikes a healthy medium because of the nuances here and there: for instance, you might find that glyphs often visually resemble the ideas that they represent, or that there are also visual similarities between nouns versus verbs. Still, languages also have enough surface differences to avoid complete analogues (such as how each language implements plural values), even altering structure at times so translation between languages isn't free. You'd think that this would lead to some degree of ambiguity interfering with the game's structure, especially since there's already a processing layer between the player and the game regarding the exact meaning of words (ex: what if you submitted a glyph as "potions" but the game insisted on the term "medicine?"). However, the game assuages this concern by having the player submit glyphs as definitions for sketched ideas (or direct analogous nouns/verbs for some glyphs), so even if players have slightly different interpretations, they'll most likely end up arriving at the same conclusion anyways. As such, the game utilizes sound compromises that lessen overall frustration but still retain the spirit of deciphering and implementing knowledge of foreign languages.
While these contrivances didn't impact my overall enjoyment, there were some external gameplay mechanics such as the forced stealth sections that generally contributed nothing to the premise and interfered with the game's pacing. I can somewhat justify a select few for making sense in-universe (i.e. eavesdropping on others' conversation while they're working to figure out what actions/objects they're referring to), but the vast majority of these forced stealth sections involved no interaction with the fictitious languages and seemed shoehorned-in to just pad out the runtime. It also doesn't help that they're not evenly spaced apart (most of the forced stealth takes place in the 2nd world and during the endgame if you're going for the true ending) and that these sections + a few chase sequences will force the player to restart if caught, with fail-states a rare occurrence throughout the rest of the game. Still, these mostly superfluous elements are but a mere blemish upon the final product, and though the ending feels slightly rushed, the silver lining is that Chants of Sennaar certainly does not wear out its welcome. It's one of the best takes upon the detective/investigation genre with no murder or theft required, and the highest praise I can give this surprise hit is that it made me even more excited for video games in a year already stacked with memorable releases.
Without its layer of fictitious languages, Chants of Sennaar would just be another traditional point-and-click adventure game: talk to NPCs, collect and utilize items to solve inventory puzzles, and explore varied landscapes to discover secrets. Yet, that added layer is all Chants of Sennaar needs to stand out, because it fundamentally understands that the act of learning is in itself a puzzle. None of the classic adventure game puzzles are actually that difficult, but conjoined with the underlying problem of deciphering the presented languages at the same time, worldly interactions feel much more engaging and cohesive in the grand scope as learning opportunities, constantly giving you chances to piece together bits of understanding throughout the journey as part of its world-building. It's a fairly simple framework that allows the developers to easily throw new curveballs by simply altering the context to adapt to new surroundings; the underlying objective (learning a new language) never changes, but how other characters/objects interact with the environment around them will differ, so the path to achieve mastery of a new language never feels exactly the same.
It's easy to fault Chants of Sennaar for its limitations. For example, there's only about thirty characters used in each language, and they're all conveniently referring to the same nouns and verbs. However, I'm more than willing to overlook these contrivances, because none of them actually detracted from the game's constructed reality: after all, the game always felt more about the process of learning new languages than the robustness of the languages themselves. Even so, I find that it strikes a healthy medium because of the nuances here and there: for instance, you might find that glyphs often visually resemble the ideas that they represent, or that there are also visual similarities between nouns versus verbs. Still, languages also have enough surface differences to avoid complete analogues (such as how each language implements plural values), even altering structure at times so translation between languages isn't free. You'd think that this would lead to some degree of ambiguity interfering with the game's structure, especially since there's already a processing layer between the player and the game regarding the exact meaning of words (ex: what if you submitted a glyph as "potions" but the game insisted on the term "medicine?"). However, the game assuages this concern by having the player submit glyphs as definitions for sketched ideas (or direct analogous nouns/verbs for some glyphs), so even if players have slightly different interpretations, they'll most likely end up arriving at the same conclusion anyways. As such, the game utilizes sound compromises that lessen overall frustration but still retain the spirit of deciphering and implementing knowledge of foreign languages.
While these contrivances didn't impact my overall enjoyment, there were some external gameplay mechanics such as the forced stealth sections that generally contributed nothing to the premise and interfered with the game's pacing. I can somewhat justify a select few for making sense in-universe (i.e. eavesdropping on others' conversation while they're working to figure out what actions/objects they're referring to), but the vast majority of these forced stealth sections involved no interaction with the fictitious languages and seemed shoehorned-in to just pad out the runtime. It also doesn't help that they're not evenly spaced apart (most of the forced stealth takes place in the 2nd world and during the endgame if you're going for the true ending) and that these sections + a few chase sequences will force the player to restart if caught, with fail-states a rare occurrence throughout the rest of the game. Still, these mostly superfluous elements are but a mere blemish upon the final product, and though the ending feels slightly rushed, the silver lining is that Chants of Sennaar certainly does not wear out its welcome. It's one of the best takes upon the detective/investigation genre with no murder or theft required, and the highest praise I can give this surprise hit is that it made me even more excited for video games in a year already stacked with memorable releases.
Fading Afternoon
2023
Ultimately, I just feel deflated after finishing (or well, getting an ending at any rate) Fading Afternoon, and not in a way that feels intended, more in a "this game has defeated me" sort of way. I really liked The Friends Of Ringo Ishikawa when I played it, it had a rough warming up period and I still would have liked it if it was a tiny bit less obtuse about what you can do but seemingly Yeo would burst into flames if anything in his games was known to you from the outset. That being said I ended up falling in love with its existential life sim mixed with a River City Ransom esque beat em up.
I think the main issue for me is that Ringo was a life sim with beat em up elements, whereas Fading Afternoon is a beat em up with life sim elements. After restarting once or twice because I had completely cocked up my playthrough by not knowing stuff (like that getting a car asap, always paying your hotel stay forward, reinforcing your territories and starting the gang war asap so you can start making money) I started to get into the groove of things. The groove of combat, combat and more combat. After what steam tells me were 5.5 hours I genuinely think I did like 2 side activities tops. All I could focus on, given the nature of the timeslots and gang war mechanics was on beating people up and finding the next Shatei to cap.
I guess I'll drop a spoiler warning here although given my playthrough there isnt all that much to spoil. The premise is, newly released Seiji Maruyama is slowly dying of cancer, he has limited time to figure out what to do before he checks out. My interpretation was that he wanted to leave the cowed Azuma a stronger clan with territory and the game seemingly leads you in this direction so I started a gang war with Tanaka whilst doing whatever other secondary bullshit Azuma told me to do. Soon I met Kato, a young hothead that Seiji takes under his wing. Now, I do like how the slowly depleting max health and limited timeslots reinforce the narrative and even the frustratingly obtuse flow of time kind of aids in this also, but again, for me it just led to me doing nothing but fighting and more fighting.
More to the point, I just don't like Seiji as a character. Maybe its cause a shithead teenager like Ringo is much more relatable to me than an old dying murderer but he just bores me, honestly. The mix which worked for me about ringo was that combination of the combat yes, but importantly the characters, the dialogue and atmosphere. There definitely is an atmosphere in FA, but that atmosphere is 90% fuckers throwing bottles at your head : which you can avoid by either a) timing a backstep b) already being in guard mode or c) being in a different z axis but most streets are narrow so this is unreliable.
I'm pretty bad at this combat, I think its only now after 5 hours I somewhat have a handle on things. Its like they made the counter be absolutely busted and able to destroy 90% of the ground goons so then they had to throw in Mr Bottle thrower, commander katana prick and admiral gunman "I hope you can pull off the gun stealing technique here or you are fucked" to pose a challenge. I only now sort of know how to somewhat consistently defeat the bottle throwers.
Again, comparing the critical path to Ringo, this is way more obtuse than ringo ever was. I know Yeo handwaves most criticism of this aspect by saying something like "I make my games so you have to pay attention and read the dialogue carefully" and fair enough, but also sometimes I straight up wrote all the dialogue down for future reference and still it was unclear what I was supposed to do. Which, maybe Im stupid but after asking on the steam forums I have to share an absolute bullshit bit of the storyline : Azuma asked us to incriminate someone by seducing a hostess, I went there with Kato (one of the few characters I gave a shit about) and we had a conversation about killing and blah blah anyways at the end Kato says "when are the girls coming" and then Im outside the hostess club. Huh?! What the fuck? What just happened? Okay, apparently I was supposed to realize that the dude we were supposed to incriminate (who Im pretty sure we were never shown a photo of so how was I meant to intuit that exactly?) was there with a blonde woman, therefore that was the woman that Azuma mentioned was sleeping with the guy, therefore I was supposed to come back another day and try to seduce the blonde lady (after two tries cause the first she just wasnt available). AVGN VOICE "HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT"
So anyways, after a dull, repetitive, demoralising routine of punching people, shooting shateis Azuma got a meeting with the Oyabun and was made to give them back some territory and call a truce. At which point I just didnt know what to do. I had spent so much time on it that I just let out a big long sigh. I thought about restarting the war but that would probably make azuma mad so I didnt. I started another one with Harada. I will say, for all my complaining I still played 6 hours of this game, which is way more than I give to most games that bring this level of anger and demoralisation to me, so on some level I was semi enjoying it. Big old spoilers now, eventually Azuma tells me to kill some TV presenter and have Kato take the heat for it. I go to the promenade but hes not there. I go to some territory that was under fire and I get sent to the hospital, where Seiji finally succumbs to his illness.
I remember a lot of people complaining that Ringo had only one ending, that none of your choices really changed the final outcome but I thought that was the point! And what an ending it was, love it or hate it, its memorable. I guess its my fault for fucking up but what a way to let the air out of me. Regarding the combat I also remember reading that Yeo once ran a poll a few years/months ago which asked what people most liked about his game, which people voted mostly for the atmosphere and gameplay almost least. He then had kind of a meltdown over it. So whilst I havent played Stone Buddha I think this is his response, lets laser focus on making the combat the key element and everything else is secondary. The billiard minigame still sucks btw. I'm sure this is probably a selling point to the beat em up heads out there, and maybe I'm just not the audience Yeo wants anymore, personally Ive played three beat em ups ever and those include FA and Ringo, so idk.
I have heard that this game has some kind of looping component, and that you can give the bag with a bunch of money to the food stand guy to get in the next playthrough, but I am so done with this game. Everything about it seems focused on making first time players suffer in favour of people who will grind 8 runs on the game but I just cannot imagine doing another run, I feel miserable now. Feel free to comment "filtered!" if you read this far though
I think the main issue for me is that Ringo was a life sim with beat em up elements, whereas Fading Afternoon is a beat em up with life sim elements. After restarting once or twice because I had completely cocked up my playthrough by not knowing stuff (like that getting a car asap, always paying your hotel stay forward, reinforcing your territories and starting the gang war asap so you can start making money) I started to get into the groove of things. The groove of combat, combat and more combat. After what steam tells me were 5.5 hours I genuinely think I did like 2 side activities tops. All I could focus on, given the nature of the timeslots and gang war mechanics was on beating people up and finding the next Shatei to cap.
I guess I'll drop a spoiler warning here although given my playthrough there isnt all that much to spoil. The premise is, newly released Seiji Maruyama is slowly dying of cancer, he has limited time to figure out what to do before he checks out. My interpretation was that he wanted to leave the cowed Azuma a stronger clan with territory and the game seemingly leads you in this direction so I started a gang war with Tanaka whilst doing whatever other secondary bullshit Azuma told me to do. Soon I met Kato, a young hothead that Seiji takes under his wing. Now, I do like how the slowly depleting max health and limited timeslots reinforce the narrative and even the frustratingly obtuse flow of time kind of aids in this also, but again, for me it just led to me doing nothing but fighting and more fighting.
More to the point, I just don't like Seiji as a character. Maybe its cause a shithead teenager like Ringo is much more relatable to me than an old dying murderer but he just bores me, honestly. The mix which worked for me about ringo was that combination of the combat yes, but importantly the characters, the dialogue and atmosphere. There definitely is an atmosphere in FA, but that atmosphere is 90% fuckers throwing bottles at your head : which you can avoid by either a) timing a backstep b) already being in guard mode or c) being in a different z axis but most streets are narrow so this is unreliable.
I'm pretty bad at this combat, I think its only now after 5 hours I somewhat have a handle on things. Its like they made the counter be absolutely busted and able to destroy 90% of the ground goons so then they had to throw in Mr Bottle thrower, commander katana prick and admiral gunman "I hope you can pull off the gun stealing technique here or you are fucked" to pose a challenge. I only now sort of know how to somewhat consistently defeat the bottle throwers.
Again, comparing the critical path to Ringo, this is way more obtuse than ringo ever was. I know Yeo handwaves most criticism of this aspect by saying something like "I make my games so you have to pay attention and read the dialogue carefully" and fair enough, but also sometimes I straight up wrote all the dialogue down for future reference and still it was unclear what I was supposed to do. Which, maybe Im stupid but after asking on the steam forums I have to share an absolute bullshit bit of the storyline : Azuma asked us to incriminate someone by seducing a hostess, I went there with Kato (one of the few characters I gave a shit about) and we had a conversation about killing and blah blah anyways at the end Kato says "when are the girls coming" and then Im outside the hostess club. Huh?! What the fuck? What just happened? Okay, apparently I was supposed to realize that the dude we were supposed to incriminate (who Im pretty sure we were never shown a photo of so how was I meant to intuit that exactly?) was there with a blonde woman, therefore that was the woman that Azuma mentioned was sleeping with the guy, therefore I was supposed to come back another day and try to seduce the blonde lady (after two tries cause the first she just wasnt available). AVGN VOICE "HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT"
So anyways, after a dull, repetitive, demoralising routine of punching people, shooting shateis Azuma got a meeting with the Oyabun and was made to give them back some territory and call a truce. At which point I just didnt know what to do. I had spent so much time on it that I just let out a big long sigh. I thought about restarting the war but that would probably make azuma mad so I didnt. I started another one with Harada. I will say, for all my complaining I still played 6 hours of this game, which is way more than I give to most games that bring this level of anger and demoralisation to me, so on some level I was semi enjoying it. Big old spoilers now, eventually Azuma tells me to kill some TV presenter and have Kato take the heat for it. I go to the promenade but hes not there. I go to some territory that was under fire and I get sent to the hospital, where Seiji finally succumbs to his illness.
I remember a lot of people complaining that Ringo had only one ending, that none of your choices really changed the final outcome but I thought that was the point! And what an ending it was, love it or hate it, its memorable. I guess its my fault for fucking up but what a way to let the air out of me. Regarding the combat I also remember reading that Yeo once ran a poll a few years/months ago which asked what people most liked about his game, which people voted mostly for the atmosphere and gameplay almost least. He then had kind of a meltdown over it. So whilst I havent played Stone Buddha I think this is his response, lets laser focus on making the combat the key element and everything else is secondary. The billiard minigame still sucks btw. I'm sure this is probably a selling point to the beat em up heads out there, and maybe I'm just not the audience Yeo wants anymore, personally Ive played three beat em ups ever and those include FA and Ringo, so idk.
I have heard that this game has some kind of looping component, and that you can give the bag with a bunch of money to the food stand guy to get in the next playthrough, but I am so done with this game. Everything about it seems focused on making first time players suffer in favour of people who will grind 8 runs on the game but I just cannot imagine doing another run, I feel miserable now. Feel free to comment "filtered!" if you read this far though
Yakyuuken
1969
I Uncovered the First Eroge Ever and it’s THIS?? (LOST MEDIA!!!) 😱
(Available on Bump Combat with photo accompaniment)
(Also on Gaming Alexandria)
One year ago, after weeks of intensive research, I put together a culmination of available knowledge on dB-Soft’s notorious, under-documented 177. My intent was for this to be the first of many projects detailing the cultural role and history of key eroge works. My research into 177 bore fruit for seemingly countless historical forays into the likes of Lover Boy, Lolita Syndrome, Night Life, and Emmy. Information on these titles was somewhat scant to be sure, but there was enough to construct a narrative. Lover Boy was knocked out in a couple days, and in revisiting my list of potential topics I was intrigued by a title I’d popped on there without much thought:
Yakyūken (Hudson Soft, n.d.)
Supposedly this predated Koei’s Night Life and even On-Line Systems’ Softporn Adventure by quite some margin, though the specific date was up for debate if not entirely lost. If I were to talk about PSK’s Lolita: Yakyūken at some point, surely it would make more sense to tackle its progenitor first. This presented a few problems. First, there is not exactly a plethora of information about this primitive eroge. Second, it seems to have left no impact. Third, there was no way to play it. For all I knew, Yakyūken did not even exist in the first place, and if it had, nobody had bothered to back it up. VGDensetsu had collated some basic information and screenshots,[1] and BEEP had acquired a copy in 2015,[2] but these only served to tease me, increasing my appetite for forbidden fruit. The type-in version printed in MZ-700 Joyful Pack only had one page of the code documented online, and a search of previous Yahoo! Auctions listings for either cassette came up empty. But MZ-700 Joyful Pack seemed to turn up frequently, that seemed the best course of action.
Unwilling to wait for it to be listed on Yahoo! Auctions again, I turned to Kosho, Japan’s secondhand bookstore search engine. Finding one listing, without a picture, I took a gamble on a copy of what appeared to be the right issue of MZ-700 Joyful Pack, and patiently waited. A month later, it arrived at my door, and while it looked different from the one I had seen online, I excitedly opened it up, flipping through each page for my treasure. Were I looking into computerised Shogi, Go, and Mahjong, I would have found it. Every type-in was a trainer, solver, or some other supplementary program for these three Japanese board games. The trail turned ice cold. Distraught, I resigned myself to searching Yahoo! Auctions weekly for the correct MZ-700 Joyful Pack or a Yakyūken cassette. After another month, the same tape I had seen on BEEP popped up; HuPack #2 for Sharp MZ-700.
Forty years old. Dirty. Discoloured. Untested. I set up my bid in a panic, shaking with anticipation for the next four days, pleading nobody would top my already high bid. I won, it reached my proxy after a week, it was on its way. Quaking as a leaf in a stiff wind, it arrived. Quickly it dawned on me my tape deck had been broken for years, but some kind folks at Gaming Alexandria thankfully offered to dump and scan it on my behalf.[3] After many months of searching, this seemingly lost progenitor to the entirety of erotic gaming was available again. Nobody particularly cared, but I had the first piece of the puzzle I needed. Tape back in hand, I imported a copy of Miyamoto Naoya’s seminal Introduction to Cultural Studies: Adult Games, the first edition of Bishōjo Game Maniax, Sansai Books’ 35 Years of Bishōjo Game History, and Maeda Hiroshi’s Our Bishōjo Game Chronicle, the only books I could source that made mention of Yakyūken.
Only problem was, what exactly is Yakyūken. Why are we stripping while playing rock paper scissors in the first place?
On the Origins of Rock Paper Scissors
Though now effectively ubiquitous across a multitude of cultures, rock paper scissors type hand games (ken) have enjoyed an astounding popularity in Japan since the eighteenth century. Brought to Japan from China sometime before 1743, the original form of Japanese ken is referred to today as kazu-ken, Nagasaki-ken, and hon-ken (“original ken”). Players sat opposite one another, showed any number of fingers on their right hand, and called out a guess as to what the sum of the fingers would be. The left hand counted one’s wins, and the loser of a set was made to drink a cup of sake. With its specific hand movements, Chinese mode of calling numbers, and embedded rules of drinking, kazu-ken flourished in the red-light district of Yoshiwara.[4] Its exoticism in the time of sakoku and Japanese Sinophilia no doubt contributed to its proliferation. However, the theatrics and, as Japanologist Sepp Linhart argues, ritualistic rules made the game difficult to penetrate for those not in the know, a far cry from the rock paper scissors we know today.[5]
Subsequent iterations of ken remedied the complications through the familiar sansukumi-ken (“ken of the three which cower one before the other”) format.[6] A wins over B, B over C, C over A. In its first iteration, mushi-ken, the frog (represented by the thumb) defeated the slug (the pinkie) which won over the snake (index finger). Itself another cultural import from China, mushi-ken gradually acquired a reputation as a game explicitly for children[7], but what won over it culturally was kitsune-ken, later Touhachi-ken. The kitsune trumps the head of the village which wins over the hunter which kills the kitsune. This two-handed ken was more popular among adults in and out of districts like Yoshiwara, particularly as the basis for libations or stripping.[8] The accompanying song, dance, and act of playing kitsune-ken as a strip-game were known as chonkina, the loser doffing an article of clothing until one was bare. Clearly intended for adult entertainment, chonkina nonetheless made itself known to children in time, as recalled in Shibuzawa Seika’s Asakusakko:
"Two children, standing opposite to each other, after having put together the palms of their hands right and left as well as alternately, finally make one of the postures of fox, hunter or village headman to decide a winner. The loser has to put off a piece of what he is wearing every time, until one of them is stark naked. To see the little children on cold winter days trembling, because one after another piece of cloth was stripped them off is a strange scene which can no longer be seen today."[9]
As the nation opened to foreigners again, chonkina became well known among foreigners, and due to the bad reputation it was bestowing to Japan, it was outlawed from September 1894 onward.[10]
Children’s mushi-ken would go on to evolve into jan-ken, the rock paper scissors with which we are familiar, but the specifics of when and how are unclear and unimportant for our purposes. Jan-ken was the preeminent ken by the end of the Meiji period, and ken on the whole was relegated to the realm of children. However, as a game intimately familiar to nearly all Japanese beyond childhood, the simple, fast-paced trichotomy of jan-ken, alongside its association with punishment systems like drink and stripping afforded jan-ken staying power beyond childhood.[11] It is a game which effectively boils down to luck, allowing for decision-making that, if nothing else, is understood to be fair.
Putting the Yakyū in Yakyūken
It’s October, 1924 in Takamatsu. To break in the new ground at Yashima, nearby industrial companies and technical schools are holding a baseball tournament. In a crushing defeat of 0-8, the team from Iyo Railway (later Iyotetsu) was humiliated by the Kosho Club, composed of students from Kagawa Prefectural Takamatsu Commercial School (now Kagawa Prefectural Takamatsu Commercial High School). [12] Later that night, the teams held a get-together at a nearby ryokan, putting on enkai-gei (“party tricks”). Manager of the Iyotetsu team and senryū poet, Goken Maeda, devised an arrangement and choreography of the 1878 nagauta piece “Genroku Hanami Odori.” The Iyotetsu team danced to shamisen in their uniforms to the delight of those in attendance. This first iteration of what would become Yakyūken (literally “baseball fist”) was based on the Japanese rock paper scissors variant kitsune-ken, but by 1947 it came to reflect now common variant jan-ken.[13] The Yakyūken performance was repeated at a consolation party in Iyotetsu’s hometown of Matsuyama, quickly gaining popularity therein and throughout Japan as the team performed it while on tour.[14]
The camaraderie instilled in audiences by the Iyotetsu team’s dance, and its spread as enkai-gei, led to many localised instances of this new form of jan-ken being performed.[15] The specifics of how prevalent it became are impossible to discern, but what is known is that Yakyūken, as with the earlier kazu-ken and kitsune-ken, became another diversion used as an excuse to imbibe and to disrobe.
野球するならこういう具合にしやしゃんせ ～ソラ しやしゃんせ～
投げたら こう打って 打ったなら こう受けて
ランナーになったらエッサッサ ～アウト・セーフヨヨイノヨイ～
It’s 1954. Contemporary Ryūkōka artists Ichiro Wakahara and Terukiku of King Records,[16] Yukie Satoshi and Kubo Takakura of Nippon Columbia,[17] and Harumi Aoki of Victor Japan[18] have all released 78 rpm singles with their own takes on Yakyūken. This musical multiple discovery of a still relatively local song brought into question where it had actually originated, with a photograph of the Matsuyama consolation party cementing Goken Maeda as its creator.[19] With this, Maeda’s original, non-chonkina song and dance came to be understood as honke Yakyūken, the orthodox iteration, the way it was meant to be. As the dance spread, alcohol flowed and clothes were shed. In an attempt to preserve the sanctity of Maeda’s phenomenon, fellow poet Tomita Tanuki established an iemoto system for honke Yakyūken around 1966, formalising its lyrical structure and attempting to preserve Yakyūken as a way, not unlike sumo. As iemoto, Tanuki in effect declared himself to be the highest authority on honke Yakyūken — it did not and would not matter how Yakyūken was actually enjoyed colloquially, only what the iemoto approved of constituted the real thing. At the same time, the city of Matsuyama introduced a new taiko performance — the Iyo-no-Matsuyama Tsuzumi Odori — for that year’s Matsuyama Odori festival. While it was popular, it lacked regionalism, and so in 1970, it was replaced with Yakyūken Odori.[20] It wasn’t just local flavour, however, as the year prior Yakyūken became a national phenomenon for more unsavoury reasons.
Birth of a Sensation: Yakyūken Breaks Into the Mainstream, or Tits Out for TV
Just as in the United States, the 1960s in Japan were marked by an increase in individuals’ buying power and the proliferation of television. Whereas the prior decade relegated television sets to the homes of the wealthy or in street-side display windows, by 1970, 90% of Japanese households owned at least one television set.[21] The penetration of the entertainment sphere into the domestic realm led to a berth of variety and comedy shows, all emphasising the joys of laughter. This proliferation rose concerns among cultural critics in the 1960s, with fears that the often lowbrow, thoughtless humour which frequently lampooned violence and sexuality were unsuited to the home, particularly where children might be watching.[22] Furthermore, such programming was becoming increasingly rote and prescriptive in its approach, thereby lessening its effect with each broadcast, making this new mode of entertainment lascivious and boring. In breaking free of an ever rigid mould, Japanese television’s saviour came in the form of Hagimoto Kinichi and Sakagami Jirō’s comedy duo Konto 55-gō. Pronounced as “konto go-jyuu go gō,” the name’s syllabic tempo, evocation of go-go dancing, and abstruse referencing of baseball player Oh Sadaharu’s 55th homerun of the 1964 season all brought about a rapidity and contemporary sensibility fitting of the pair’s comedic stylings.[23]
From their television debut in 1967, Konto 55-gō demonstrated a dynamic physicality in stark contrast to similar acts, often moving so fast that cameras could not keep up with them, the laughter of the audience sometimes being the only indicator of a punchline’s delivery.[24] While a breath of fresh air, cultural critics lambasted this seeming over-correction as yet again inappropriate for home audiences. On the other hand, audiences adored the duo’s comedy, with renowned Buddhist nun, translator of Genji Monogatari into modern Japanese, and self-described Konto 55-gō fan Jakucho Setouchi (then known as Harumi Setouchi) saying Kinichi and Jirō made her “laugh so much that [her] stomach ached."[25]
This focus on unpredictability, shattering of expectations and conventions, and need to perpetually one-up themselves, Konto 55-gō chased and reinforced the proliferation of what Allan Kaprow described as ‘Happening.’ Originally coined in 1959 in reference to art-related events in which the artist took on theatrical directions and modes of expression, Happenings flourished throughout the United States through the 1950s and 1960s, spreading globally but predominantly in Germany and Japan.[26] In the context of the Japanese television industry, ‘Happening’ was co-opted to refer to anything unscripted — quite the opposite from its intent as a label for deliberate performance — after the early 1968 program Kijima Norio Happuningu Sho (“Kijima Norio’s Happening Show”).[27] To be clear, Happenings in this context were still partially staged just as art Happenings were, but the intent from producers was that Happenings would go off the rails by virtue of a lack of scripting and the co-operation and involvement of audience participants. As other shows and producers chased this spontaneity and carried in the wake of Konto 55-gō’s pioneering transgressions, the stakes became higher and content needed to become more compelling, more novel, more edgy, more risque.
The most critical apex of Happening for our purposes came in 1969 on Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase (“Konto 55-gō Blow away the competition”). It was here that Yakyūken was introduced as a segment of the program, with Kinichi and Jirō facing off against numerous women, each stripping an article of clothing upon a loss. Removed articles were then auctioned to raise funds for children orphaned by traffic accidents.[28] The segment was an enormous hit among adults and children, some critics praising this nakedness as incredibly real, the pinnacle of the Happening.[29] At the same time, just as with all of Konto 55-gō’s antics, many loathed this primetime strip tease wholly inappropriate for children to view, some citing it as a siege against one of the sole bulwarks left against Japan’s growing moral decline, the home.[30] Scorn came not only from without, however, but within as well. Kinichi would later go on to say Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase was his most disliked programme he ever worked on, in no small part due to the Yakyūken segment which brought viewers in not for the comedy of the duo, but for the titillation and obscenity of the Yakyūken act itself.[31] Furthermore, in 2005, Kinichi visited Matsuyama to apologise personally to fourth honke Yakyūken iemoto Tsuyoshitoshi Sawada for misrepresenting Yakyūken. Despite this resentment from Kinichi and some critics, Yakyūken reinvigorated jan-ken into a game with stakes, with merriment, with rules everyone was already familiar with, with a catchy song and dance, that brought the Happening into the real world.
Through Konto 55-gō’s work, Yakyūken presented the same problem that chonkina had in the previous century — a breaking of the boundaries between adult entertainment and the recreation of children. This was no longer bound to the district of Asakusa, but the whole of Japan. Further still, the growing popularity of Yakyūken and its association with Konto 55-gō spread the popular conception of the dance originating as a strip performance, rendering the attempts of Tanuki’s iemoto system to preserve the sanctity of Maeda’s original work increasingly ineffective. The iemoto system only had merit when the associated act could be considered a tradition worth preserving such as tea ceremony or calligraphy. With Yakyūken compromising the cultural zeitgeist as a strip game, it became difficult to consider it a valuable cultural commodity. While it is possible this was the greater underlying reason for Matsuyama’s introduction of Yakyūken Odori to the Matsuyama Odori festival in 1970, it cannot be stated as certainty. What was certain was that Yakyūken was here to stay as a television staple, at least for a moment.
Yakyūken remained a part of Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase through to the end of 1969, afterwards being spun-off into its own program Konto 55-gō no Yakyūken!! From November 26, 1969, thirty minutes of strip rock-paper-scissors littered the airwaves every Wednesday at 9PM until the program was discontinued in April 1970.[32] Yakyūken would not be broadcast on Nippon TV for another two decades, returning on New Year’s Eve, 1993 as part of Supa Denpa Bazaru Toshikoshi Janbo Dosokai (“Super Radio Bazaar New Year’s Jumbo Alumni Reunion”). Though no longer televised in the interim, Yakyūken remained in the cultural zeitgeist as a strip game. While impossible to discern at what point Yakyūken became a mainstay of Japanese pornographic production, it has become ubiquitous — a cursory search of Japanese pornographic clip site eroterest.net gives over 34,000 results for Yakyūken. What is certain is that Yakyūken similarly became not just a mainstay of Japanese erotic video games, but the foundation of the entire industry.
In Which I Finally Tell You About the Video Game Yakyūken by Hudson Soft
With 500,000 yen in starting capital, brothers Yūji and Hiroshi Kudō founded Hudson Co., Ltd. in Toyohira-ku, Sapporo on May 18, 1973. Named after the duo’s favourite class of train, the 4-6-4 Hudson, Yūji and Hiroshi sold fine art photographs of locomotives. In September, the brothers opened a dedicated amateur radio shop, CQ Hudson, which stood at 3-7-26, Hiragishi, Toyohira-ku into the new millennium.[33] After travelling to the US shortly thereafter to market their wares, Yūji saw personal computers on general sale for the first time, inspiring him to bring home a PolyMorphic Systems Poly-88 to Japan and learn to program, taking on two million yen in credit card debt to finance the purchase.[34] Well before the personal computer revolution hit Japan, The Kudō brothers were pioneers. The shops of Akihabara bore no fruit for them, necessitating the Poly-88 import. By 1975, the Kudōs had fully branched out into personal computer products, turning type-in programs into pre-packaged cassette tape releases for the sake of convenience, and becoming early adopters of NEC’s 1976 TK-80 and Sharp’s MZ-80 line of computers.[35] The Kudō brothers also began to start writing their own programs around this time under the development team name Miso Ramen Group.
Hudson released at least thirty-seven games for the MZ-80 line, available occasionally as type-ins in magazines like Micom or in books like MZ-80B活用研究. There was a little bit of everything in Miso Ramen Group’s offerings, from the Maze War-esque Ramen Maze 3D to Othello to Operation Escape, wherein the player had to sneak out of class not unlike Konami’s 1984 Beatles-laden Mikie.[36] In the summer of 1979, Hudson was approached by a computer manufacturer with a proposal to sell their software by mail order with an advertisement in Micom for July 1979.[37] The ads were a success, with the Kudōs recounting later that deposits at the bank took upwards of thirty minutes because tellers thought they might be criminals.[38] Yakyūken’s existence in this initial advertisement makes it plain that the game was developed prior to mid-1979, and the ad was laid bare in a 1996 television documentary special by NHK. Yet Yakyūken’s status as the first commercial erotic game seems to have fallen to the wayside.
The game is incredibly simple, as one might expect from a preliminary type-in program from the late 1970s.[39] The player decides how many articles of clothing they wish themselves to have, not dissimilar from a lives system, and is then introduced to their opponent, Megumi.
わたしめぐみよろしくね。(“I’m Megumi, nice to meet you.”)
A few bars of the Yakyūken song beep languidly from the piezoelectric speaker with a bold OUT!! SAFE!! ヨヨイノヨイ covering the screen. The player chooses グ (rock), チョキ (scissors), or パ (paper). In the event of a tie, the process repeats. Should the player lose, an article of clothing is theoretically removed with no visual indication. Should they win, Megumi is declared ‘out’ and her avatar removes an article of clothing. Shirt, skirt, bra, panties. An eyebrow is cocked when her outer attire comes off, the other joining in twain when her bra comes loose. When she loses her panties, Megumi covers her crotch and shrieks "キャー！！はやくあっちへいって！！" (“Kyaa! Quickly, get out!!”) Game end. The original MZ-80 release was monochromatic, but the later MZ-700 versions were in colour, used to minimal effect. It really is as simple as that.
Who’s on first?
Koei’s first entry in their Strawberry Porno series, Night Life, dominates much of the historical record as the earliest erotic game, particularly in the West. Hardcore Gaming 101, Matthew T. Jones, Wikipedia, and MobyGames (among others) authoritatively claim it to be the first, and on occasion one might see PSK’s Lolita Yakyūken cited in its place, but both works released in 1982, the same year as Custer’s Revenge.[40] ASCII Corporation’s history of the NEC PC-8801 show similar family trees wherein Night Life is the root of all Japanese eroge, its own ancestor being On-Line Systems’ 1981 Softporn Adventure.[41] So too does Pasokon Super Special PC Game 80s Chronicle.[42] When Yakyūken is mentioned by these sources, it is as a possibility, something which might be true but lacks veracity, yet the evidence is plain.
Perhaps Yakyūken was simply too early, releasing before heavy-hitter platforms like the NEC PC-88 or Fujitsu FM-7. The MZ-80 line’s flagship was the MZ-80K, released in 1978. It was available only as an assembly kit, which, coupled with its high retail price of ¥198,000, left it in the realm of the enthusiast and academic (particularly engineering students).[43] While games were blatantly possible on the platform, they were far from the focus, limiting the audience for Hudson’s games, particularly Yakyūken, dramatically. Further still, it was sold primarily through mail order, advertised in niche magazines without pictures. Hudson got paid, and quite well at that, but orders came for a litany of their products. Without knowing this was an explicit game, the prospect of playing digital jan-ken must have paled in comparison to Othello or Hudson’s more arcade-style offerings. By the time it came to the next generation on 1982’s MZ-700, the floodgates had already been opened, and platforms capable of graphics dominated the eroge space.
Perhaps Night Life and Lolita Yakyūken take the historiographical spotlight because they lack the primitiveness of Yakyūken. There is no denying that Yakyūken lacks the graphical fidelity of its descendants. Bound by the 80 column by 50 row display of the MZ-80K, space is limited, colour an impossibility, and everything is comprised of text characters as the hardware could not display graphics. The Japanese character ROM bears no curvilinear shapes apart from circles.[44] The hand signs are malformed, and though your opponent, doesn’t look bad per se, her rectangular body’s attempt at an hourglass figure is not exactly stunning. As games writer Yoshiki Osawa described it in the 2000 book Bisyoujyo Game Maniax, [sic] the visuals lack gender specificity, and exhibit a crudeness that cannot even be called ASCII art.[45] Compared to the full colour illustrations of PSK’s Lolita Yakyūken or even the silhouettes of Night Life, Yakyūken comes up short.
Perhaps Yakyūken was too outdated to catch on without some additional gimmick such as lolicon artwork. The original dance craze had occurred a quarter-century earlier, and it had been barred from television for nearly a decade. By the admission of MZ-700 Joyful Pack, Yakyūken was unlikely to resonate with those who did not grow up in the postwar period. A craze to be sure, but a craze for a generation past, one which had little interest in computing. The type-in’s accompanying text even had to make explicit that Yakyūken had virtually nothing to do with baseball, despite its name, as well as the fact this was a game of chonkina.
What these comparisons ignore is that stunning the world was not necessarily Yakyūken’s purpose. Though sold commercially, projects in its vein from Hudson were as much at home on cassette as they were printed as type-ins. By having their code laid entirely bare, type-ins meant hobbyists dabbling in a brand new technology could visually see and alter the program. The type-in’s purpose was to demonstrate what a computer could do. A user could change Megumi-chan into a man, increase her bust size, style her hair. Perhaps they could do away with jan-ken and replace its symbols with those from Touhachi-ken. Why not increase the number of options available for some digital Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock? Just as type-ins are used to teach today, so were they then — deliberately open ecosystems in which to learn. Night Life and Lolita Yakyūken were as walled gardens, the magic unable to be discerned.
In Which I Admit This is All Pedantry and Ultimately Does Not Matter
The fact of the matter is that this is all pedantry and ultimately it does not matter. While monumental firsts are readily recorded, the more niche the subject matter, the more abstruse the truth of a first becomes. Any history student can tell you this after a course on historiography and the historical method. The fact of the matter is that what comes first is arbitrary, determined by fallible, biased humans trying to further an argument.
The search for historical firsts has overtaken much of contemporary historical scholarship, and the problem with this is that there is invariably always an earlier example, and the argument of something as coming earlier is increasingly valueless. Certainly there will always come a true first, but how can we know it is certain with an always imperfect historical record? Does it matter if something came first if it was too ahead of its time? Would we be better off as historians focusing more on moments of critical mass as others in adjacent fields do, such as Marek Zvelebil did in his research on agricultural innovations in the archaeological record?[46] Who is to say. What I can say for sure is that I sincerely hope Yakyūken is not the first commercial erotic game. I hope to be disproved at some point in the future. I hope that in trying to set the record straight in this one instance, it can be set straight in another. I hope the drive for better histories never ends, and that at some point we can dwell less on firsts, and more on more critical narratives in games history, cultural history, human history.
__________________________
[1] Video Games Densetsu, “Yakyūken / 野球拳, Probably the First Erotic Video Game Ever Released.,” Tumblr, November 18, 2016, https://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/153336334460/yaky%C5%ABken-%E9%87%8E%E7%90%83%E6%8B%B3-probably-the-first-erotic-video.
[2] “【宅配買取】MZ-700用野球拳（ハドソン）を宮城県仙台市のお客様よりお譲りいただきました｜BEEP,” BEEP, April 16, 2019, http://www.beep-shop.com/blog/5921/.
[3] “Hudson Soft - HuPack #2 (Featuring Rowdy-Ball and Yakyūken)(Scans + GameRip) : Hudson Soft,” Internet Archive, July 1, 2023, https://archive.org/details/Hudson-soft-hupack-2.
[4] Sepp Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken: The Deterioration of a Game from Exoticism into Ordinariness (SUNY Press, 1998), 322-323.
[5] Sepp Linhart, “Rituality in the Ken Game,” Ceremony and Ritual in Japan, (2013): 39. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203429549-10.
[6] Linhart, “Rituality in the Ken Game,” 39.
[7] Kitamura Nobuyo. 1933. Kiyu shoran. 2 vols. Tokyo: Seikokan shoten, quoted in Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken, 325.
[8] Stewart Culin, Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1895), 46-47.
[9] Shibuzawa Seika. 1966. Asakusakko. Tokyo: Zoukeisha, quoted in Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken, 334-335.
[10] Hironori Takahashi, “Japanese fist games” (in Japanese): Osaka University of Commerce Amusement Industry Research Institute (2014): 203.
[11] Thomas Crump, Japanese Numbers Game (London: Routledge, 1992). 146.
[12] “本当は脱がない「野球拳」 松山発祥、90年の歴史,” 日本経済新聞, June 29, 2014, https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASFG230DO_V20C14A6BC8000/. Accounts seem to differ on the final score, with some sources claiming it was a 0-6 defeat, others 0-8. As 0-8 is cited by the fourth Iemoto of Yakyūken, that is the number I have decided to use.
[13] Takakashi, “Japanese fist games,” 204-205.
[14] Takakashi, “Japanese fist games,” 204-205.
[15] Takao Ohashi, “A Trademark Registration for ‘野球拳おどり’ (Yakyu-Ken Dance ) - パークス法律事務所,” パークス法律事務所 -, December 9, 2021, https://pax.law/topics/blog/1242/.
[16] 野球けん 若原一郎・照菊, YouTube (YouTube, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H58uhkoQrbo.
[17] 久保幸江・高倉敏 野球拳, YouTube (YouTube, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xdfh4dBWeM.
[18] 靑木 はるみ ♪野球けん♪ 1954年 78rpm Record. Columbia Model No G ｰ 241 Phonograph, YouTube (YouTube, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycCAK69hc7w.
[19] “本家 野球拳,” GMOとくとくBB｜運営実績20年以上のおトクなプロバイダー, accessed October 2, 2023, http://shikoku.me/iyo-matsuri/raijin/honkeyakyuuken/history/index.html.
[20] “松山野球拳おどりのあゆみ,” 松山野球拳おどり 公式ホームページ, accessed October 2, 2023, https://baseball-dance.com/about/story/.
[21] David Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday: Konto 55-gō and the Teleivision Comedy of the Late 60s” Japan Studies Association Journal 15, no. 1 (2017): 24.
[22] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 24.
[23] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 28.
[24] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 28-30.
[25] Harumi Setouchi, “Tondari hanetari… Konto 55-gō no gei to sugao,” Oh! (August 1968): 176-177, quoted in Humphrey: “Shattering the Everyday,” 30.
[26] Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958),” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1-9.
[27] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 32.
[28] “欽ちゃん「もっとも嫌いな番組だった」 ２人の芸風の違いが浮き彫りになった「裏番組をぶっとばせ！」,” イザ！, September 4, 2018, https://www.iza.ne.jp/article/20180904-HGNF6BYZ5VLH5CV54ZLQFEC2MA/.
[29] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 36-37.
[30] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 37.
[31] イザ！, “欽ちゃん”
[32] マスコミ市民 : ジャーナリストと市民を結ぶ情報誌 (36)
[33] “Company Information,” Hudson Soft, December 11, 2000, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20001211040400/http://www.hudson.co.jp:80/coinfo/history.html; Brian Eddy, “Video Game History 101: Hudson Soft,” New Retro Wave, January 30, 2017, https://newretrowave.com/2017/01/30/video-game-history-101-hudson-soft/.
[34] Damien McFerran, “Hudson Profile — Part 1,” Retro Gamer Magazine 66, (2009): 68; スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回 「ビデオゲーム」 ～巨富の攻防～ (NHK, 1996), streaming video, 40:16, Internet Archive. There are conflicting accounts on why Yūji went to the United States and what his first computer was. The information cited here comes from an interview with Yūji himself. Doug Carlston claims that his first computer was actually a SBC80, followed by an IMSAI, but I have not found further evidence to support this claim. See Doug Carlston, Software People: Inside the Computer Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 253-257.
[35] The specifics of the timeline become unclear around this time; Japanese microcomputers weren’t commercially available for consumers until mid-1976, yet Hudson’s own company history has them pegged as making PC cassettes and equipment in September 1975.
[36] スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回, 45:10; “エスケープ大作戦 ,” Animaka.sakura.ne.jp, accessed October 2, 2023, http://animaka.sakura.ne.jp/MZ2000/escape_daisakusen.html; Naoki Miyamoto, Erogē Bunka Kenkyū Gairon (Tōkyō: Sōgō Kagaku Shuppan, 2017), 18-19.
[37] マイコン, July 1979, 11.
[38] スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回, 45:41.
[39] A full playthrough of the MZ-700 HuPack #2 version is available here: https://youtu.be/M6Emyk5_-jY
[40] “Eroge / Hentai Games,” MobyGames, accessed October 2, 2023, https://www.mobygames.com/group/2508/eroge-hentai-games/; “Eroge,” Wikipedia, September 27, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroge; Matthew T. Jones, “The Impact of Telepresence on Cultural Transmission through Bishoujo Games,” PsychNology Journal 3 (2005): 295; “Retro Japanese Computers: Gaming’s Final Frontier,” Hardcore Gaming 101, accessed October 2, 2023, http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/JPNcomputers/Japanesecomputers2.htm.
[41] 蘇るPC-8801伝説 永久保存版 (Tōkyō: ASCII, 2006), 212.
[42] Mesgamer, “日本最古のエ□ゲー！ハドソンの野球拳を語るの！,” 顔面ソニーレイなの！, accessed October 2, 2023, https://mesgamer.hatenablog.com/entry/2022/02/21/173437.
[43] Sharp, Sharp 100-Year History, (2012), 6-08.
[44] “80k Download - Roms,” MZ, accessed October 2, 2023, https://original.sharpmz.org/mz-80k/dldrom.htm.
[45] 美少女ゲームマニアックス (Tōkyō: Kirutaimukomyunikēshon, 2001), 66.
[46] See Marek Zvelebil, “Transition to Farming in Norther Europe: A Hunter-Gatherer Perspective,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 17 (1984), 104-127.
(Available on Bump Combat with photo accompaniment)
(Also on Gaming Alexandria)
One year ago, after weeks of intensive research, I put together a culmination of available knowledge on dB-Soft’s notorious, under-documented 177. My intent was for this to be the first of many projects detailing the cultural role and history of key eroge works. My research into 177 bore fruit for seemingly countless historical forays into the likes of Lover Boy, Lolita Syndrome, Night Life, and Emmy. Information on these titles was somewhat scant to be sure, but there was enough to construct a narrative. Lover Boy was knocked out in a couple days, and in revisiting my list of potential topics I was intrigued by a title I’d popped on there without much thought:
Yakyūken (Hudson Soft, n.d.)
Supposedly this predated Koei’s Night Life and even On-Line Systems’ Softporn Adventure by quite some margin, though the specific date was up for debate if not entirely lost. If I were to talk about PSK’s Lolita: Yakyūken at some point, surely it would make more sense to tackle its progenitor first. This presented a few problems. First, there is not exactly a plethora of information about this primitive eroge. Second, it seems to have left no impact. Third, there was no way to play it. For all I knew, Yakyūken did not even exist in the first place, and if it had, nobody had bothered to back it up. VGDensetsu had collated some basic information and screenshots,[1] and BEEP had acquired a copy in 2015,[2] but these only served to tease me, increasing my appetite for forbidden fruit. The type-in version printed in MZ-700 Joyful Pack only had one page of the code documented online, and a search of previous Yahoo! Auctions listings for either cassette came up empty. But MZ-700 Joyful Pack seemed to turn up frequently, that seemed the best course of action.
Unwilling to wait for it to be listed on Yahoo! Auctions again, I turned to Kosho, Japan’s secondhand bookstore search engine. Finding one listing, without a picture, I took a gamble on a copy of what appeared to be the right issue of MZ-700 Joyful Pack, and patiently waited. A month later, it arrived at my door, and while it looked different from the one I had seen online, I excitedly opened it up, flipping through each page for my treasure. Were I looking into computerised Shogi, Go, and Mahjong, I would have found it. Every type-in was a trainer, solver, or some other supplementary program for these three Japanese board games. The trail turned ice cold. Distraught, I resigned myself to searching Yahoo! Auctions weekly for the correct MZ-700 Joyful Pack or a Yakyūken cassette. After another month, the same tape I had seen on BEEP popped up; HuPack #2 for Sharp MZ-700.
Forty years old. Dirty. Discoloured. Untested. I set up my bid in a panic, shaking with anticipation for the next four days, pleading nobody would top my already high bid. I won, it reached my proxy after a week, it was on its way. Quaking as a leaf in a stiff wind, it arrived. Quickly it dawned on me my tape deck had been broken for years, but some kind folks at Gaming Alexandria thankfully offered to dump and scan it on my behalf.[3] After many months of searching, this seemingly lost progenitor to the entirety of erotic gaming was available again. Nobody particularly cared, but I had the first piece of the puzzle I needed. Tape back in hand, I imported a copy of Miyamoto Naoya’s seminal Introduction to Cultural Studies: Adult Games, the first edition of Bishōjo Game Maniax, Sansai Books’ 35 Years of Bishōjo Game History, and Maeda Hiroshi’s Our Bishōjo Game Chronicle, the only books I could source that made mention of Yakyūken.
Only problem was, what exactly is Yakyūken. Why are we stripping while playing rock paper scissors in the first place?
On the Origins of Rock Paper Scissors
Though now effectively ubiquitous across a multitude of cultures, rock paper scissors type hand games (ken) have enjoyed an astounding popularity in Japan since the eighteenth century. Brought to Japan from China sometime before 1743, the original form of Japanese ken is referred to today as kazu-ken, Nagasaki-ken, and hon-ken (“original ken”). Players sat opposite one another, showed any number of fingers on their right hand, and called out a guess as to what the sum of the fingers would be. The left hand counted one’s wins, and the loser of a set was made to drink a cup of sake. With its specific hand movements, Chinese mode of calling numbers, and embedded rules of drinking, kazu-ken flourished in the red-light district of Yoshiwara.[4] Its exoticism in the time of sakoku and Japanese Sinophilia no doubt contributed to its proliferation. However, the theatrics and, as Japanologist Sepp Linhart argues, ritualistic rules made the game difficult to penetrate for those not in the know, a far cry from the rock paper scissors we know today.[5]
Subsequent iterations of ken remedied the complications through the familiar sansukumi-ken (“ken of the three which cower one before the other”) format.[6] A wins over B, B over C, C over A. In its first iteration, mushi-ken, the frog (represented by the thumb) defeated the slug (the pinkie) which won over the snake (index finger). Itself another cultural import from China, mushi-ken gradually acquired a reputation as a game explicitly for children[7], but what won over it culturally was kitsune-ken, later Touhachi-ken. The kitsune trumps the head of the village which wins over the hunter which kills the kitsune. This two-handed ken was more popular among adults in and out of districts like Yoshiwara, particularly as the basis for libations or stripping.[8] The accompanying song, dance, and act of playing kitsune-ken as a strip-game were known as chonkina, the loser doffing an article of clothing until one was bare. Clearly intended for adult entertainment, chonkina nonetheless made itself known to children in time, as recalled in Shibuzawa Seika’s Asakusakko:
"Two children, standing opposite to each other, after having put together the palms of their hands right and left as well as alternately, finally make one of the postures of fox, hunter or village headman to decide a winner. The loser has to put off a piece of what he is wearing every time, until one of them is stark naked. To see the little children on cold winter days trembling, because one after another piece of cloth was stripped them off is a strange scene which can no longer be seen today."[9]
As the nation opened to foreigners again, chonkina became well known among foreigners, and due to the bad reputation it was bestowing to Japan, it was outlawed from September 1894 onward.[10]
Children’s mushi-ken would go on to evolve into jan-ken, the rock paper scissors with which we are familiar, but the specifics of when and how are unclear and unimportant for our purposes. Jan-ken was the preeminent ken by the end of the Meiji period, and ken on the whole was relegated to the realm of children. However, as a game intimately familiar to nearly all Japanese beyond childhood, the simple, fast-paced trichotomy of jan-ken, alongside its association with punishment systems like drink and stripping afforded jan-ken staying power beyond childhood.[11] It is a game which effectively boils down to luck, allowing for decision-making that, if nothing else, is understood to be fair.
Putting the Yakyū in Yakyūken
It’s October, 1924 in Takamatsu. To break in the new ground at Yashima, nearby industrial companies and technical schools are holding a baseball tournament. In a crushing defeat of 0-8, the team from Iyo Railway (later Iyotetsu) was humiliated by the Kosho Club, composed of students from Kagawa Prefectural Takamatsu Commercial School (now Kagawa Prefectural Takamatsu Commercial High School). [12] Later that night, the teams held a get-together at a nearby ryokan, putting on enkai-gei (“party tricks”). Manager of the Iyotetsu team and senryū poet, Goken Maeda, devised an arrangement and choreography of the 1878 nagauta piece “Genroku Hanami Odori.” The Iyotetsu team danced to shamisen in their uniforms to the delight of those in attendance. This first iteration of what would become Yakyūken (literally “baseball fist”) was based on the Japanese rock paper scissors variant kitsune-ken, but by 1947 it came to reflect now common variant jan-ken.[13] The Yakyūken performance was repeated at a consolation party in Iyotetsu’s hometown of Matsuyama, quickly gaining popularity therein and throughout Japan as the team performed it while on tour.[14]
The camaraderie instilled in audiences by the Iyotetsu team’s dance, and its spread as enkai-gei, led to many localised instances of this new form of jan-ken being performed.[15] The specifics of how prevalent it became are impossible to discern, but what is known is that Yakyūken, as with the earlier kazu-ken and kitsune-ken, became another diversion used as an excuse to imbibe and to disrobe.
野球するならこういう具合にしやしゃんせ ～ソラ しやしゃんせ～
投げたら こう打って 打ったなら こう受けて
ランナーになったらエッサッサ ～アウト・セーフヨヨイノヨイ～
It’s 1954. Contemporary Ryūkōka artists Ichiro Wakahara and Terukiku of King Records,[16] Yukie Satoshi and Kubo Takakura of Nippon Columbia,[17] and Harumi Aoki of Victor Japan[18] have all released 78 rpm singles with their own takes on Yakyūken. This musical multiple discovery of a still relatively local song brought into question where it had actually originated, with a photograph of the Matsuyama consolation party cementing Goken Maeda as its creator.[19] With this, Maeda’s original, non-chonkina song and dance came to be understood as honke Yakyūken, the orthodox iteration, the way it was meant to be. As the dance spread, alcohol flowed and clothes were shed. In an attempt to preserve the sanctity of Maeda’s phenomenon, fellow poet Tomita Tanuki established an iemoto system for honke Yakyūken around 1966, formalising its lyrical structure and attempting to preserve Yakyūken as a way, not unlike sumo. As iemoto, Tanuki in effect declared himself to be the highest authority on honke Yakyūken — it did not and would not matter how Yakyūken was actually enjoyed colloquially, only what the iemoto approved of constituted the real thing. At the same time, the city of Matsuyama introduced a new taiko performance — the Iyo-no-Matsuyama Tsuzumi Odori — for that year’s Matsuyama Odori festival. While it was popular, it lacked regionalism, and so in 1970, it was replaced with Yakyūken Odori.[20] It wasn’t just local flavour, however, as the year prior Yakyūken became a national phenomenon for more unsavoury reasons.
Birth of a Sensation: Yakyūken Breaks Into the Mainstream, or Tits Out for TV
Just as in the United States, the 1960s in Japan were marked by an increase in individuals’ buying power and the proliferation of television. Whereas the prior decade relegated television sets to the homes of the wealthy or in street-side display windows, by 1970, 90% of Japanese households owned at least one television set.[21] The penetration of the entertainment sphere into the domestic realm led to a berth of variety and comedy shows, all emphasising the joys of laughter. This proliferation rose concerns among cultural critics in the 1960s, with fears that the often lowbrow, thoughtless humour which frequently lampooned violence and sexuality were unsuited to the home, particularly where children might be watching.[22] Furthermore, such programming was becoming increasingly rote and prescriptive in its approach, thereby lessening its effect with each broadcast, making this new mode of entertainment lascivious and boring. In breaking free of an ever rigid mould, Japanese television’s saviour came in the form of Hagimoto Kinichi and Sakagami Jirō’s comedy duo Konto 55-gō. Pronounced as “konto go-jyuu go gō,” the name’s syllabic tempo, evocation of go-go dancing, and abstruse referencing of baseball player Oh Sadaharu’s 55th homerun of the 1964 season all brought about a rapidity and contemporary sensibility fitting of the pair’s comedic stylings.[23]
From their television debut in 1967, Konto 55-gō demonstrated a dynamic physicality in stark contrast to similar acts, often moving so fast that cameras could not keep up with them, the laughter of the audience sometimes being the only indicator of a punchline’s delivery.[24] While a breath of fresh air, cultural critics lambasted this seeming over-correction as yet again inappropriate for home audiences. On the other hand, audiences adored the duo’s comedy, with renowned Buddhist nun, translator of Genji Monogatari into modern Japanese, and self-described Konto 55-gō fan Jakucho Setouchi (then known as Harumi Setouchi) saying Kinichi and Jirō made her “laugh so much that [her] stomach ached."[25]
This focus on unpredictability, shattering of expectations and conventions, and need to perpetually one-up themselves, Konto 55-gō chased and reinforced the proliferation of what Allan Kaprow described as ‘Happening.’ Originally coined in 1959 in reference to art-related events in which the artist took on theatrical directions and modes of expression, Happenings flourished throughout the United States through the 1950s and 1960s, spreading globally but predominantly in Germany and Japan.[26] In the context of the Japanese television industry, ‘Happening’ was co-opted to refer to anything unscripted — quite the opposite from its intent as a label for deliberate performance — after the early 1968 program Kijima Norio Happuningu Sho (“Kijima Norio’s Happening Show”).[27] To be clear, Happenings in this context were still partially staged just as art Happenings were, but the intent from producers was that Happenings would go off the rails by virtue of a lack of scripting and the co-operation and involvement of audience participants. As other shows and producers chased this spontaneity and carried in the wake of Konto 55-gō’s pioneering transgressions, the stakes became higher and content needed to become more compelling, more novel, more edgy, more risque.
The most critical apex of Happening for our purposes came in 1969 on Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase (“Konto 55-gō Blow away the competition”). It was here that Yakyūken was introduced as a segment of the program, with Kinichi and Jirō facing off against numerous women, each stripping an article of clothing upon a loss. Removed articles were then auctioned to raise funds for children orphaned by traffic accidents.[28] The segment was an enormous hit among adults and children, some critics praising this nakedness as incredibly real, the pinnacle of the Happening.[29] At the same time, just as with all of Konto 55-gō’s antics, many loathed this primetime strip tease wholly inappropriate for children to view, some citing it as a siege against one of the sole bulwarks left against Japan’s growing moral decline, the home.[30] Scorn came not only from without, however, but within as well. Kinichi would later go on to say Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase was his most disliked programme he ever worked on, in no small part due to the Yakyūken segment which brought viewers in not for the comedy of the duo, but for the titillation and obscenity of the Yakyūken act itself.[31] Furthermore, in 2005, Kinichi visited Matsuyama to apologise personally to fourth honke Yakyūken iemoto Tsuyoshitoshi Sawada for misrepresenting Yakyūken. Despite this resentment from Kinichi and some critics, Yakyūken reinvigorated jan-ken into a game with stakes, with merriment, with rules everyone was already familiar with, with a catchy song and dance, that brought the Happening into the real world.
Through Konto 55-gō’s work, Yakyūken presented the same problem that chonkina had in the previous century — a breaking of the boundaries between adult entertainment and the recreation of children. This was no longer bound to the district of Asakusa, but the whole of Japan. Further still, the growing popularity of Yakyūken and its association with Konto 55-gō spread the popular conception of the dance originating as a strip performance, rendering the attempts of Tanuki’s iemoto system to preserve the sanctity of Maeda’s original work increasingly ineffective. The iemoto system only had merit when the associated act could be considered a tradition worth preserving such as tea ceremony or calligraphy. With Yakyūken compromising the cultural zeitgeist as a strip game, it became difficult to consider it a valuable cultural commodity. While it is possible this was the greater underlying reason for Matsuyama’s introduction of Yakyūken Odori to the Matsuyama Odori festival in 1970, it cannot be stated as certainty. What was certain was that Yakyūken was here to stay as a television staple, at least for a moment.
Yakyūken remained a part of Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase through to the end of 1969, afterwards being spun-off into its own program Konto 55-gō no Yakyūken!! From November 26, 1969, thirty minutes of strip rock-paper-scissors littered the airwaves every Wednesday at 9PM until the program was discontinued in April 1970.[32] Yakyūken would not be broadcast on Nippon TV for another two decades, returning on New Year’s Eve, 1993 as part of Supa Denpa Bazaru Toshikoshi Janbo Dosokai (“Super Radio Bazaar New Year’s Jumbo Alumni Reunion”). Though no longer televised in the interim, Yakyūken remained in the cultural zeitgeist as a strip game. While impossible to discern at what point Yakyūken became a mainstay of Japanese pornographic production, it has become ubiquitous — a cursory search of Japanese pornographic clip site eroterest.net gives over 34,000 results for Yakyūken. What is certain is that Yakyūken similarly became not just a mainstay of Japanese erotic video games, but the foundation of the entire industry.
In Which I Finally Tell You About the Video Game Yakyūken by Hudson Soft
With 500,000 yen in starting capital, brothers Yūji and Hiroshi Kudō founded Hudson Co., Ltd. in Toyohira-ku, Sapporo on May 18, 1973. Named after the duo’s favourite class of train, the 4-6-4 Hudson, Yūji and Hiroshi sold fine art photographs of locomotives. In September, the brothers opened a dedicated amateur radio shop, CQ Hudson, which stood at 3-7-26, Hiragishi, Toyohira-ku into the new millennium.[33] After travelling to the US shortly thereafter to market their wares, Yūji saw personal computers on general sale for the first time, inspiring him to bring home a PolyMorphic Systems Poly-88 to Japan and learn to program, taking on two million yen in credit card debt to finance the purchase.[34] Well before the personal computer revolution hit Japan, The Kudō brothers were pioneers. The shops of Akihabara bore no fruit for them, necessitating the Poly-88 import. By 1975, the Kudōs had fully branched out into personal computer products, turning type-in programs into pre-packaged cassette tape releases for the sake of convenience, and becoming early adopters of NEC’s 1976 TK-80 and Sharp’s MZ-80 line of computers.[35] The Kudō brothers also began to start writing their own programs around this time under the development team name Miso Ramen Group.
Hudson released at least thirty-seven games for the MZ-80 line, available occasionally as type-ins in magazines like Micom or in books like MZ-80B活用研究. There was a little bit of everything in Miso Ramen Group’s offerings, from the Maze War-esque Ramen Maze 3D to Othello to Operation Escape, wherein the player had to sneak out of class not unlike Konami’s 1984 Beatles-laden Mikie.[36] In the summer of 1979, Hudson was approached by a computer manufacturer with a proposal to sell their software by mail order with an advertisement in Micom for July 1979.[37] The ads were a success, with the Kudōs recounting later that deposits at the bank took upwards of thirty minutes because tellers thought they might be criminals.[38] Yakyūken’s existence in this initial advertisement makes it plain that the game was developed prior to mid-1979, and the ad was laid bare in a 1996 television documentary special by NHK. Yet Yakyūken’s status as the first commercial erotic game seems to have fallen to the wayside.
The game is incredibly simple, as one might expect from a preliminary type-in program from the late 1970s.[39] The player decides how many articles of clothing they wish themselves to have, not dissimilar from a lives system, and is then introduced to their opponent, Megumi.
わたしめぐみよろしくね。(“I’m Megumi, nice to meet you.”)
A few bars of the Yakyūken song beep languidly from the piezoelectric speaker with a bold OUT!! SAFE!! ヨヨイノヨイ covering the screen. The player chooses グ (rock), チョキ (scissors), or パ (paper). In the event of a tie, the process repeats. Should the player lose, an article of clothing is theoretically removed with no visual indication. Should they win, Megumi is declared ‘out’ and her avatar removes an article of clothing. Shirt, skirt, bra, panties. An eyebrow is cocked when her outer attire comes off, the other joining in twain when her bra comes loose. When she loses her panties, Megumi covers her crotch and shrieks "キャー！！はやくあっちへいって！！" (“Kyaa! Quickly, get out!!”) Game end. The original MZ-80 release was monochromatic, but the later MZ-700 versions were in colour, used to minimal effect. It really is as simple as that.
Who’s on first?
Koei’s first entry in their Strawberry Porno series, Night Life, dominates much of the historical record as the earliest erotic game, particularly in the West. Hardcore Gaming 101, Matthew T. Jones, Wikipedia, and MobyGames (among others) authoritatively claim it to be the first, and on occasion one might see PSK’s Lolita Yakyūken cited in its place, but both works released in 1982, the same year as Custer’s Revenge.[40] ASCII Corporation’s history of the NEC PC-8801 show similar family trees wherein Night Life is the root of all Japanese eroge, its own ancestor being On-Line Systems’ 1981 Softporn Adventure.[41] So too does Pasokon Super Special PC Game 80s Chronicle.[42] When Yakyūken is mentioned by these sources, it is as a possibility, something which might be true but lacks veracity, yet the evidence is plain.
Perhaps Yakyūken was simply too early, releasing before heavy-hitter platforms like the NEC PC-88 or Fujitsu FM-7. The MZ-80 line’s flagship was the MZ-80K, released in 1978. It was available only as an assembly kit, which, coupled with its high retail price of ¥198,000, left it in the realm of the enthusiast and academic (particularly engineering students).[43] While games were blatantly possible on the platform, they were far from the focus, limiting the audience for Hudson’s games, particularly Yakyūken, dramatically. Further still, it was sold primarily through mail order, advertised in niche magazines without pictures. Hudson got paid, and quite well at that, but orders came for a litany of their products. Without knowing this was an explicit game, the prospect of playing digital jan-ken must have paled in comparison to Othello or Hudson’s more arcade-style offerings. By the time it came to the next generation on 1982’s MZ-700, the floodgates had already been opened, and platforms capable of graphics dominated the eroge space.
Perhaps Night Life and Lolita Yakyūken take the historiographical spotlight because they lack the primitiveness of Yakyūken. There is no denying that Yakyūken lacks the graphical fidelity of its descendants. Bound by the 80 column by 50 row display of the MZ-80K, space is limited, colour an impossibility, and everything is comprised of text characters as the hardware could not display graphics. The Japanese character ROM bears no curvilinear shapes apart from circles.[44] The hand signs are malformed, and though your opponent, doesn’t look bad per se, her rectangular body’s attempt at an hourglass figure is not exactly stunning. As games writer Yoshiki Osawa described it in the 2000 book Bisyoujyo Game Maniax, [sic] the visuals lack gender specificity, and exhibit a crudeness that cannot even be called ASCII art.[45] Compared to the full colour illustrations of PSK’s Lolita Yakyūken or even the silhouettes of Night Life, Yakyūken comes up short.
Perhaps Yakyūken was too outdated to catch on without some additional gimmick such as lolicon artwork. The original dance craze had occurred a quarter-century earlier, and it had been barred from television for nearly a decade. By the admission of MZ-700 Joyful Pack, Yakyūken was unlikely to resonate with those who did not grow up in the postwar period. A craze to be sure, but a craze for a generation past, one which had little interest in computing. The type-in’s accompanying text even had to make explicit that Yakyūken had virtually nothing to do with baseball, despite its name, as well as the fact this was a game of chonkina.
What these comparisons ignore is that stunning the world was not necessarily Yakyūken’s purpose. Though sold commercially, projects in its vein from Hudson were as much at home on cassette as they were printed as type-ins. By having their code laid entirely bare, type-ins meant hobbyists dabbling in a brand new technology could visually see and alter the program. The type-in’s purpose was to demonstrate what a computer could do. A user could change Megumi-chan into a man, increase her bust size, style her hair. Perhaps they could do away with jan-ken and replace its symbols with those from Touhachi-ken. Why not increase the number of options available for some digital Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock? Just as type-ins are used to teach today, so were they then — deliberately open ecosystems in which to learn. Night Life and Lolita Yakyūken were as walled gardens, the magic unable to be discerned.
In Which I Admit This is All Pedantry and Ultimately Does Not Matter
The fact of the matter is that this is all pedantry and ultimately it does not matter. While monumental firsts are readily recorded, the more niche the subject matter, the more abstruse the truth of a first becomes. Any history student can tell you this after a course on historiography and the historical method. The fact of the matter is that what comes first is arbitrary, determined by fallible, biased humans trying to further an argument.
The search for historical firsts has overtaken much of contemporary historical scholarship, and the problem with this is that there is invariably always an earlier example, and the argument of something as coming earlier is increasingly valueless. Certainly there will always come a true first, but how can we know it is certain with an always imperfect historical record? Does it matter if something came first if it was too ahead of its time? Would we be better off as historians focusing more on moments of critical mass as others in adjacent fields do, such as Marek Zvelebil did in his research on agricultural innovations in the archaeological record?[46] Who is to say. What I can say for sure is that I sincerely hope Yakyūken is not the first commercial erotic game. I hope to be disproved at some point in the future. I hope that in trying to set the record straight in this one instance, it can be set straight in another. I hope the drive for better histories never ends, and that at some point we can dwell less on firsts, and more on more critical narratives in games history, cultural history, human history.
__________________________
[1] Video Games Densetsu, “Yakyūken / 野球拳, Probably the First Erotic Video Game Ever Released.,” Tumblr, November 18, 2016, https://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/153336334460/yaky%C5%ABken-%E9%87%8E%E7%90%83%E6%8B%B3-probably-the-first-erotic-video.
[2] “【宅配買取】MZ-700用野球拳（ハドソン）を宮城県仙台市のお客様よりお譲りいただきました｜BEEP,” BEEP, April 16, 2019, http://www.beep-shop.com/blog/5921/.
[3] “Hudson Soft - HuPack #2 (Featuring Rowdy-Ball and Yakyūken)(Scans + GameRip) : Hudson Soft,” Internet Archive, July 1, 2023, https://archive.org/details/Hudson-soft-hupack-2.
[4] Sepp Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken: The Deterioration of a Game from Exoticism into Ordinariness (SUNY Press, 1998), 322-323.
[5] Sepp Linhart, “Rituality in the Ken Game,” Ceremony and Ritual in Japan, (2013): 39. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203429549-10.
[6] Linhart, “Rituality in the Ken Game,” 39.
[7] Kitamura Nobuyo. 1933. Kiyu shoran. 2 vols. Tokyo: Seikokan shoten, quoted in Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken, 325.
[8] Stewart Culin, Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1895), 46-47.
[9] Shibuzawa Seika. 1966. Asakusakko. Tokyo: Zoukeisha, quoted in Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken, 334-335.
[10] Hironori Takahashi, “Japanese fist games” (in Japanese): Osaka University of Commerce Amusement Industry Research Institute (2014): 203.
[11] Thomas Crump, Japanese Numbers Game (London: Routledge, 1992). 146.
[12] “本当は脱がない「野球拳」 松山発祥、90年の歴史,” 日本経済新聞, June 29, 2014, https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASFG230DO_V20C14A6BC8000/. Accounts seem to differ on the final score, with some sources claiming it was a 0-6 defeat, others 0-8. As 0-8 is cited by the fourth Iemoto of Yakyūken, that is the number I have decided to use.
[13] Takakashi, “Japanese fist games,” 204-205.
[14] Takakashi, “Japanese fist games,” 204-205.
[15] Takao Ohashi, “A Trademark Registration for ‘野球拳おどり’ (Yakyu-Ken Dance ) - パークス法律事務所,” パークス法律事務所 -, December 9, 2021, https://pax.law/topics/blog/1242/.
[16] 野球けん 若原一郎・照菊, YouTube (YouTube, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H58uhkoQrbo.
[17] 久保幸江・高倉敏 野球拳, YouTube (YouTube, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xdfh4dBWeM.
[18] 靑木 はるみ ♪野球けん♪ 1954年 78rpm Record. Columbia Model No G ｰ 241 Phonograph, YouTube (YouTube, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycCAK69hc7w.
[19] “本家 野球拳,” GMOとくとくBB｜運営実績20年以上のおトクなプロバイダー, accessed October 2, 2023, http://shikoku.me/iyo-matsuri/raijin/honkeyakyuuken/history/index.html.
[20] “松山野球拳おどりのあゆみ,” 松山野球拳おどり 公式ホームページ, accessed October 2, 2023, https://baseball-dance.com/about/story/.
[21] David Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday: Konto 55-gō and the Teleivision Comedy of the Late 60s” Japan Studies Association Journal 15, no. 1 (2017): 24.
[22] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 24.
[23] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 28.
[24] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 28-30.
[25] Harumi Setouchi, “Tondari hanetari… Konto 55-gō no gei to sugao,” Oh! (August 1968): 176-177, quoted in Humphrey: “Shattering the Everyday,” 30.
[26] Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958),” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1-9.
[27] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 32.
[28] “欽ちゃん「もっとも嫌いな番組だった」 ２人の芸風の違いが浮き彫りになった「裏番組をぶっとばせ！」,” イザ！, September 4, 2018, https://www.iza.ne.jp/article/20180904-HGNF6BYZ5VLH5CV54ZLQFEC2MA/.
[29] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 36-37.
[30] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 37.
[31] イザ！, “欽ちゃん”
[32] マスコミ市民 : ジャーナリストと市民を結ぶ情報誌 (36)
[33] “Company Information,” Hudson Soft, December 11, 2000, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20001211040400/http://www.hudson.co.jp:80/coinfo/history.html; Brian Eddy, “Video Game History 101: Hudson Soft,” New Retro Wave, January 30, 2017, https://newretrowave.com/2017/01/30/video-game-history-101-hudson-soft/.
[34] Damien McFerran, “Hudson Profile — Part 1,” Retro Gamer Magazine 66, (2009): 68; スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回 「ビデオゲーム」 ～巨富の攻防～ (NHK, 1996), streaming video, 40:16, Internet Archive. There are conflicting accounts on why Yūji went to the United States and what his first computer was. The information cited here comes from an interview with Yūji himself. Doug Carlston claims that his first computer was actually a SBC80, followed by an IMSAI, but I have not found further evidence to support this claim. See Doug Carlston, Software People: Inside the Computer Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 253-257.
[35] The specifics of the timeline become unclear around this time; Japanese microcomputers weren’t commercially available for consumers until mid-1976, yet Hudson’s own company history has them pegged as making PC cassettes and equipment in September 1975.
[36] スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回, 45:10; “エスケープ大作戦 ,” Animaka.sakura.ne.jp, accessed October 2, 2023, http://animaka.sakura.ne.jp/MZ2000/escape_daisakusen.html; Naoki Miyamoto, Erogē Bunka Kenkyū Gairon (Tōkyō: Sōgō Kagaku Shuppan, 2017), 18-19.
[37] マイコン, July 1979, 11.
[38] スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回, 45:41.
[39] A full playthrough of the MZ-700 HuPack #2 version is available here: https://youtu.be/M6Emyk5_-jY
[40] “Eroge / Hentai Games,” MobyGames, accessed October 2, 2023, https://www.mobygames.com/group/2508/eroge-hentai-games/; “Eroge,” Wikipedia, September 27, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroge; Matthew T. Jones, “The Impact of Telepresence on Cultural Transmission through Bishoujo Games,” PsychNology Journal 3 (2005): 295; “Retro Japanese Computers: Gaming’s Final Frontier,” Hardcore Gaming 101, accessed October 2, 2023, http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/JPNcomputers/Japanesecomputers2.htm.
[41] 蘇るPC-8801伝説 永久保存版 (Tōkyō: ASCII, 2006), 212.
[42] Mesgamer, “日本最古のエ□ゲー！ハドソンの野球拳を語るの！,” 顔面ソニーレイなの！, accessed October 2, 2023, https://mesgamer.hatenablog.com/entry/2022/02/21/173437.
[43] Sharp, Sharp 100-Year History, (2012), 6-08.
[44] “80k Download - Roms,” MZ, accessed October 2, 2023, https://original.sharpmz.org/mz-80k/dldrom.htm.
[45] 美少女ゲームマニアックス (Tōkyō: Kirutaimukomyunikēshon, 2001), 66.
[46] See Marek Zvelebil, “Transition to Farming in Norther Europe: A Hunter-Gatherer Perspective,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 17 (1984), 104-127.
Sagres
2023
Didn't originally write a review for this because I didn't finish it, but I feel like I need to get some closure here. Sagres was one of my biggest disappointments this year. This might be an odd thing to say of a game who's existence I learned of the very same day it released but the demo I played of it had so much promise and charm I can't believe they fucked it up.
Sagres is an exploration themed RPG set in the age of sail. Under the auspices of Prince Henry the navigator of Portugal, you play as an aspiring sailor who joins the navy in part to help a friend get to the bottom of the intrigue of her missing Father. The game's name derives from the popular (if wrong) idea of Prince Henry setting up a sort of center of learning at the town of Sagres to train cartographers and navigators of all sorts. But don't worry, thats like the least of Sagres' liberties when it comes to historical accuracy.
The core of Sagres is simple, you obtain information and quests from guilds to "discover" landmarks around the world, ranging from "check out this church in Spain, we've heard it looks cool" to "Figure out if we can reach India via Africa because the land route is not really feasible right now". You have to manage your ship's durability and resources, though its not super in depth and you can do the usual thing of trading resources by buying goods from one port and selling it at another where its a higher price. This is the good bit of this game.
There's also turnbased, literal rocks, paper, scissors combat with pirates and other enemy sailors. You line up 3 cards to play against the opponents 3 cards and the level of "insight" your character has determines how many cards you can see face up from either the 3 cards on the table or the cards the AI isnt playing this round. Its fine, mostly RNG fest, I lost like twice during the whole game even though I was "underleveled". Also, this game doesn't understand what a privateer is? A privateer isnt just the name for a european pirate, its a pirate in service to a country.
I think I was sold on the demo and the game when I reached Copenhaguen and none of my party members spoke the local language very profficiently so the dialogue with the local pub owner who would give me information on where to see the northern lights for the quest I was in went some thing like "H`, yo/)ll ne^+ to hçad <p t@ t`ç 66&X 20*>". I could either guess what he was trying to say or search around for a Translator in a nearby port. This would cost money and time, importantly, which I might not have. Its moments like these or even when I was going around africa blindly not knowing where the next port was with dwindling supplies, a damaged ship and low crew morale and I managed to just about reach the safety of port, Sagres excels.
And man, we do not have enough historical themed non action RPGs that don't suck. There's like, Pentiment, Darklands(though I havent played it yet) and what? Maybe there's some Japanese one's I dont know about.
So, given all this goodwill, how does Sagres fuck it all up? Well, for one thing, that language system I mentioned is kinda rough. Now, I get that in a game such as this there are going to have to be compromises and simplifications and I'll even grant that it makes sense to treat certain languages more as language families or perhaps take the view of the portuguese navigators rather than a more objective modern view. But at some point it just doesn't make sense that Spanish and Portuguese get their own languages but "Romance", "Germanic" and most egregious of all "African" get lumped in as if they were monolithic.
Similarly, whilst the game at least has the good sense to condemn imperialism of the Americas, its hard not to see the entire game as a romanticisation of european colonialism through the lens of "exploration". Although unintentionally it does kinda subvert it by having 90% of these "discoveries" be places that were well known beforehand like the cathedral at Santiago etc. There is also the whole chapter of the game taking place in the americas which, idk man I'm not the most qualified to talk about and it has been a week or two since I played it but its about what you would expect in terms of pretty milquetoast commentary on colonialism and the like (though there's one point at which the indigenous leader talks about how much he likes this new rum that the europeans have been making which uhh)
There is also a chapter in which you go to Egypt and in order to enter Alexandria (which is closed off to europeans apparently) you have to... wear a turban. Thats seemingly all it takes for europeans to blend in with Egyptians. I think this is where the first red flag appeared to me.
There's also a semi fantastical element, which I'm fine with because its kind of hidden, its like they took all the stories of sailors encountering fantastical creatures and just made it real.
Anyways, at the end of my playthrough I got to the point in which you reach the Americas and it becomes extremely tedious. Beyond the aforementioned stuff with the depiction of the preHispanic central America, the game takes away all your ship parts and makes you go around for way, way too long to obtain them all, grinding as you are essentially in a sort of slave/serf relationship to an indigenous chief. After all that and grinding trade between havana and some town on the yucatan I had all my ship parts paid off and returned, whereupon I was informed I needed to grind 200,000 of the local currency in order to proceed. I had 3500. So I abandoned the game, it wasn't hard to make money admittedly, just slow and tedious, but the game had already lost me and frankly I have better things to do.
I give this game an extra half a star for including Las Palmas as a port and ignoring Tenerife completely. I audibly cheered when I saw this. That being said, the inhabitants shared the default sprite for "Africa" which, I guess given the previous simplifications in language and culture isnt super egregious but it just underscores the lack of understanding or care.
Sagres is an exploration themed RPG set in the age of sail. Under the auspices of Prince Henry the navigator of Portugal, you play as an aspiring sailor who joins the navy in part to help a friend get to the bottom of the intrigue of her missing Father. The game's name derives from the popular (if wrong) idea of Prince Henry setting up a sort of center of learning at the town of Sagres to train cartographers and navigators of all sorts. But don't worry, thats like the least of Sagres' liberties when it comes to historical accuracy.
The core of Sagres is simple, you obtain information and quests from guilds to "discover" landmarks around the world, ranging from "check out this church in Spain, we've heard it looks cool" to "Figure out if we can reach India via Africa because the land route is not really feasible right now". You have to manage your ship's durability and resources, though its not super in depth and you can do the usual thing of trading resources by buying goods from one port and selling it at another where its a higher price. This is the good bit of this game.
There's also turnbased, literal rocks, paper, scissors combat with pirates and other enemy sailors. You line up 3 cards to play against the opponents 3 cards and the level of "insight" your character has determines how many cards you can see face up from either the 3 cards on the table or the cards the AI isnt playing this round. Its fine, mostly RNG fest, I lost like twice during the whole game even though I was "underleveled". Also, this game doesn't understand what a privateer is? A privateer isnt just the name for a european pirate, its a pirate in service to a country.
I think I was sold on the demo and the game when I reached Copenhaguen and none of my party members spoke the local language very profficiently so the dialogue with the local pub owner who would give me information on where to see the northern lights for the quest I was in went some thing like "H`, yo/)ll ne^+ to hçad <p t@ t`ç 66&X 20*>". I could either guess what he was trying to say or search around for a Translator in a nearby port. This would cost money and time, importantly, which I might not have. Its moments like these or even when I was going around africa blindly not knowing where the next port was with dwindling supplies, a damaged ship and low crew morale and I managed to just about reach the safety of port, Sagres excels.
And man, we do not have enough historical themed non action RPGs that don't suck. There's like, Pentiment, Darklands(though I havent played it yet) and what? Maybe there's some Japanese one's I dont know about.
So, given all this goodwill, how does Sagres fuck it all up? Well, for one thing, that language system I mentioned is kinda rough. Now, I get that in a game such as this there are going to have to be compromises and simplifications and I'll even grant that it makes sense to treat certain languages more as language families or perhaps take the view of the portuguese navigators rather than a more objective modern view. But at some point it just doesn't make sense that Spanish and Portuguese get their own languages but "Romance", "Germanic" and most egregious of all "African" get lumped in as if they were monolithic.
Similarly, whilst the game at least has the good sense to condemn imperialism of the Americas, its hard not to see the entire game as a romanticisation of european colonialism through the lens of "exploration". Although unintentionally it does kinda subvert it by having 90% of these "discoveries" be places that were well known beforehand like the cathedral at Santiago etc. There is also the whole chapter of the game taking place in the americas which, idk man I'm not the most qualified to talk about and it has been a week or two since I played it but its about what you would expect in terms of pretty milquetoast commentary on colonialism and the like (though there's one point at which the indigenous leader talks about how much he likes this new rum that the europeans have been making which uhh)
There is also a chapter in which you go to Egypt and in order to enter Alexandria (which is closed off to europeans apparently) you have to... wear a turban. Thats seemingly all it takes for europeans to blend in with Egyptians. I think this is where the first red flag appeared to me.
There's also a semi fantastical element, which I'm fine with because its kind of hidden, its like they took all the stories of sailors encountering fantastical creatures and just made it real.
Anyways, at the end of my playthrough I got to the point in which you reach the Americas and it becomes extremely tedious. Beyond the aforementioned stuff with the depiction of the preHispanic central America, the game takes away all your ship parts and makes you go around for way, way too long to obtain them all, grinding as you are essentially in a sort of slave/serf relationship to an indigenous chief. After all that and grinding trade between havana and some town on the yucatan I had all my ship parts paid off and returned, whereupon I was informed I needed to grind 200,000 of the local currency in order to proceed. I had 3500. So I abandoned the game, it wasn't hard to make money admittedly, just slow and tedious, but the game had already lost me and frankly I have better things to do.
I give this game an extra half a star for including Las Palmas as a port and ignoring Tenerife completely. I audibly cheered when I saw this. That being said, the inhabitants shared the default sprite for "Africa" which, I guess given the previous simplifications in language and culture isnt super egregious but it just underscores the lack of understanding or care.
Let's Catch
2008
Hi, I'm Joey.
Sorry, it's been a while since I played catch.
So you'll have to forgive me if my aim is off.
Nice throw!
You want to know how I've been?
I haven't been great lately.
I know we only started playing, but I can't pretend things are fine.
I should be honest, I haven't been great for a while.
Watching that ball pierce the air, I thought I should break the silence.
Maybe that was inappropriate, I'm sorry.
Good one!
What's that?
You don't mind?
I appreciate that, thank you.
It can be hard to get others to lend you an ear when you need it.
Why am I down?
Good question, I don't fully know.
For a while I thought it was missed medications.
Something tangible and real I could blame it on.
But I'm starting to think that's not the case.
You really don't mind talking about this?
If you'd rather just play catch that's okay too...
Okay, if you're sure...
I suppose it's fitting to have a heart to heart while we play catch.
We're taking turns.
Allowing each other space and time until we're called upon.
Sorry, just a silly thought.
I don't think it's the medication though.
At least, not anymore.
It feels more and more like a part of me is missing.
Maybe it always was, maybe I was just made aware of it...
★☆☆☆☆
Maybe what I'm missing is people.
It feels like people come and go a lot in my life these past few years.
I don't blame them, of course, things don't last forever.
But I still miss them.
Some were in real life. People move. People change.
I guess that's true online, too.
I'm guilty of coming and going myself.
It feels harsh in retrospect, but sometimes I feel so afraid and trapped and I have to run.
I'm sure it's that way for others, too.
I wonder if they know I miss them?
I wonder if they miss me, too.
★★☆☆☆
Maybe what I'm missing is time.
Since graduating university and the whole COVID thing, time doesn't seem the same.
I always have too much, but too little.
But when I feel like I have too much, it's nice to while it away.
Like we're doing now.
Thanks for playing with me, by the way.
I know you could be spending your own time in other ways.
With other people.
It's nice to be able to just talk.
When I feel I have too little time, I again become scared.
I fear I've spread myself too thin, made too many promises.
Like I'm trying to do too much.
And so much of it feels fruitless. Like the only one who cares is me.
Or worse, that not even I care.
Maybe that's a sign I shouldn't do the things I don't care about.
But that abandonment hurts as much as the slipping of time does.
★★★☆☆
Maybe what I'm missing is myself.
It feels all the time like I'm living a lie.
Like I'll break kayfabe at some point, and the old me will show itself.
But I know the old me is the same me as the me I am now.
Sorry, that was a marble-mouthed way to put it.
Still, it's as if I've given parts of myself to others.
And to the things I make and do.
Without giving myself time to regenerate those parts.
It's as if I'm letting genies out of bottles and hurriedly trying to shove them back in.
Like I'm scared of the consequences of my own actions.
I think I'm scared that I am who I am.
That my relationships, my life, simply are the way they are.
And sometimes things go great, we get to go a little longer.
Just like when one of us catches or throws perfectly.
We get to keep things going a tiny bit longer.
Just like when we reach a new level.
We get a deeper bond, a sense of fulfillment, and get to keep going.
Only I've been missing too many throws, fumbling more catches than I make.
And I know that one of these times, I'll turn to grab the ball.
Pleading that things can continue a bit longer.
Only to turn around, and see another person I'm playing catch with leave.
See another piece of myself leave.
★★★★☆
I'm sorry, I don't mean to cry.
This is supposed to be a nice game of catch.
And you were so nice to let me talk about myself.
And I've gone and ruined it.
Things always end up like this.
Maybe that's why I try not to get close to others.
I end up hurting them just as I hurt myself.
I end up needing more and more affirmation and validation.
I take and I take without giving back.
I'm making things worse, aren't I?
I just know when this is over, I'll have to go back to pretending things are fine.
And they just aren't.
★★★★★
If it's alright with you, I'd like to stop playing catch for now.
Thanks for letting me talk your ear off.
Despite the tears, I really enjoyed this.
And I really hope you'll play with me again.
Maybe next time I won't be so sad.
But maybe I will.
And maybe it won't matter.
Uhmm... I know this might be silly.
And that we don't really know each other that well.
But I hope I get to see you again.
Get to hear your voice again.
And until the next time, I hope with all my heart that things go well for you.
Or get better for you.
And until the next time, I will miss you tremendously.
Not because I'm sad you're gone.
But because I was so happy you were here.
Sorry, it's been a while since I played catch.
So you'll have to forgive me if my aim is off.
Nice throw!
You want to know how I've been?
I haven't been great lately.
I know we only started playing, but I can't pretend things are fine.
I should be honest, I haven't been great for a while.
Watching that ball pierce the air, I thought I should break the silence.
Maybe that was inappropriate, I'm sorry.
Good one!
What's that?
You don't mind?
I appreciate that, thank you.
It can be hard to get others to lend you an ear when you need it.
Why am I down?
Good question, I don't fully know.
For a while I thought it was missed medications.
Something tangible and real I could blame it on.
But I'm starting to think that's not the case.
You really don't mind talking about this?
If you'd rather just play catch that's okay too...
Okay, if you're sure...
I suppose it's fitting to have a heart to heart while we play catch.
We're taking turns.
Allowing each other space and time until we're called upon.
Sorry, just a silly thought.
I don't think it's the medication though.
At least, not anymore.
It feels more and more like a part of me is missing.
Maybe it always was, maybe I was just made aware of it...
★☆☆☆☆
Maybe what I'm missing is people.
It feels like people come and go a lot in my life these past few years.
I don't blame them, of course, things don't last forever.
But I still miss them.
Some were in real life. People move. People change.
I guess that's true online, too.
I'm guilty of coming and going myself.
It feels harsh in retrospect, but sometimes I feel so afraid and trapped and I have to run.
I'm sure it's that way for others, too.
I wonder if they know I miss them?
I wonder if they miss me, too.
★★☆☆☆
Maybe what I'm missing is time.
Since graduating university and the whole COVID thing, time doesn't seem the same.
I always have too much, but too little.
But when I feel like I have too much, it's nice to while it away.
Like we're doing now.
Thanks for playing with me, by the way.
I know you could be spending your own time in other ways.
With other people.
It's nice to be able to just talk.
When I feel I have too little time, I again become scared.
I fear I've spread myself too thin, made too many promises.
Like I'm trying to do too much.
And so much of it feels fruitless. Like the only one who cares is me.
Or worse, that not even I care.
Maybe that's a sign I shouldn't do the things I don't care about.
But that abandonment hurts as much as the slipping of time does.
★★★☆☆
Maybe what I'm missing is myself.
It feels all the time like I'm living a lie.
Like I'll break kayfabe at some point, and the old me will show itself.
But I know the old me is the same me as the me I am now.
Sorry, that was a marble-mouthed way to put it.
Still, it's as if I've given parts of myself to others.
And to the things I make and do.
Without giving myself time to regenerate those parts.
It's as if I'm letting genies out of bottles and hurriedly trying to shove them back in.
Like I'm scared of the consequences of my own actions.
I think I'm scared that I am who I am.
That my relationships, my life, simply are the way they are.
And sometimes things go great, we get to go a little longer.
Just like when one of us catches or throws perfectly.
We get to keep things going a tiny bit longer.
Just like when we reach a new level.
We get a deeper bond, a sense of fulfillment, and get to keep going.
Only I've been missing too many throws, fumbling more catches than I make.
And I know that one of these times, I'll turn to grab the ball.
Pleading that things can continue a bit longer.
Only to turn around, and see another person I'm playing catch with leave.
See another piece of myself leave.
★★★★☆
I'm sorry, I don't mean to cry.
This is supposed to be a nice game of catch.
And you were so nice to let me talk about myself.
And I've gone and ruined it.
Things always end up like this.
Maybe that's why I try not to get close to others.
I end up hurting them just as I hurt myself.
I end up needing more and more affirmation and validation.
I take and I take without giving back.
I'm making things worse, aren't I?
I just know when this is over, I'll have to go back to pretending things are fine.
And they just aren't.
★★★★★
If it's alright with you, I'd like to stop playing catch for now.
Thanks for letting me talk your ear off.
Despite the tears, I really enjoyed this.
And I really hope you'll play with me again.
Maybe next time I won't be so sad.
But maybe I will.
And maybe it won't matter.
Uhmm... I know this might be silly.
And that we don't really know each other that well.
But I hope I get to see you again.
Get to hear your voice again.
And until the next time, I hope with all my heart that things go well for you.
Or get better for you.
And until the next time, I will miss you tremendously.
Not because I'm sad you're gone.
But because I was so happy you were here.
Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.
This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.
This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.